Tech yourself before you wreck yourself

Today was the first day of the Education Summit in Iowa. Most of the events were streamed live, and I'm hoping the Department of Education will also post the videos for anyone who missed them today. For now, I want to focus on the afternoon's opening remarks by Scott McLeod, professor at Iowa State University and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology in Leadership (CASTLE).

McLeod is an educator who understands the digital age, the 'Net Generation, and the possibilities and challenges our increasingly tech-based world presents to educators. In his remarks, he named a dozen things (including a catch-all "And so on...") educators would do "[i]f we were REALLY serious about educational technology." As a fairly regular ad hoc Wiki* contributor and editor, I particularly enjoyed item four: "we'd teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than 'just saying no' to Wikipedia." All of McLeod's suggestions focus on involving students (and ourselves) in learning and using technology to engage with the digital world in which our students already exist and for which they must be prepared by the time they graduate.

To McLeod's list I would add that we should involve students in developing the software and technology of the future. I know from personal experience that technology development is within reach for our students; I was eight or nine when I wrote my first DOS-based computer program on an IBM PC and saved it to a floppy disk before the end of class time. My school was a technology leader of its time, with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. Nearly two decades later, not much has changed in the schools where my teacher peers and I have taught and are teaching. Each is equipped with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. And cell phones and other hand-held digital devices are banned.

Even SMART Boards, truly revolutionary tools in the hands of tech-savvy educators, are often reduced to their lowest-tech function when time-pressured classroom teachers become stuck using the digital markers to jot down test-prep lessons, just as they would use dry-erase markers on a non-interactive whiteboard. It doesn't have to be this way. With tech knowledge, computers for students, and the freedom to teach, today's teachers can and should be pushing students to develop new computer programs -- call them apps, if you will -- along with written, oral, and digital presentations to "pitch" their initial ideas to peer-collaborators and, later, "market" their final products to classmates. If we teach them, these are skills our students can use today, as they prepare themselves for the future.

Watch where you put that yardstick!

On the theme of What Gets Measured Gets Improved, here is some very exciting news from the great state of Utah: State lawmakers are considering replacing grade-specific high-stakes tests with adaptive tests that allow students to demonstrate what they actually know and have learned, even if they are performing well-below or well-above grade level. This is encouraging news for all students and teachers, most especially those involved in education of exceptional students in special education and gifted and talented programs.

Two major problems of traditional grade-level tests limit their usefulness as measures of individual student progress. First, tests vary, often greatly, in content and rigor from one grade to the next, making them meaningless for tracking learning from year to year. Second, the tests fail to measure the progress of exceptional students. In New York, if a student is reading on a kindergarten level in third grade and improves to a first-grade reading level by fourth grade, that student's year of progress is obscured and diminished by a Level 1 score ("Not Meeting the Standard") on the state test. Meanwhile, a third grader capable of seventh-grade math could score a Level 4 ("Meeting the Standard with Distinction") for three years in a row without making any individual progress at all.

Computer adaptive tests solve these problems by adapting to students' abilities regardless of grade level. Basing questions on student performance during the test, the software allows more-advanced students access to more-advanced questions and less-advanced students access to questions at their current level of academic function. This targeted testing provides students and educators with meaningful data about how much students actually know and can do. Paired with software to analyze test results and provide students and educators with individualized "next steps," computer adaptive testing could give students and teachers an incredibly useful tool for growth and development: the feedback loop.

How big of a deal is this? The Deseret News quotes State Board of Education member Dave Thomas's statement to the Education Interim Committee: "This is the biggest change we've seen in public education in the last decade.... It really puts Utah at the forefront.... And I mean right at the forefront." I agree. For now, Utah is the only state with an adaptive test pilot program because it's the only state with a NCLB waiver. State legislators will consider adopting the program statewide during the 2012 legislative session.

Keep an eye on this one; if computer adaptive testing is allowed to develop and improve in Utah, the innovation could spread to New York State to support the development (and boost the morale!) of under-recognized students and teachers right here at home.

Links

Thomas Goetz's excellent Wired Magazine article

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops

Molly Farmer's Deseret News report

Utah lawmakers mull ditching CRTs in favor of adaptive tests

Raise up your staff, part 2

In part 1, we looked at new principal training programs preparing school leaders to manage increasingly businessified education settings. Now we turn our attention to the preparation of the teachers -- the professional subjects of educational management and the front-line leaders of classrooms. New York City currently claims a three-year new teacher attrition rate of 40% or more. Clearly new teachers are under-supported and under-prepared for their professional roles.

Doug Lemov, once a successful teacher and now a managing director with Uncommon Schools, recognized this and set out to do something about it. As the national rhetoric has shifted toward "getting rid of bad teachers," Lemov realized that many good people were failing as teachers simply because they had never actually learned how to teach. Replacing them with equally ill-prepared peers would not solve the problem. He set out to discover and codify the specific practices effective teachers employ. Last year Lemov published his book of "49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path toward College." He uses the book as a guide to train new teachers in the Uncommon Schools network.

Last spring, I had the opportunity to read an advanced draft of the book and see the techniques in practice in several classrooms at Uncommon's Leadership Prep Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School. The effect was impressive. Students as young as five were consistently orderly, engaged, and on-task. It was all very controlled. Admittedly, this is a huge step up from the disorganization and lack of focus I have witnessed in over a dozen New York City schools.

It disturbs me, though, especially in light of recent research on problem solving and executive functioning, that Lemov devotes only one chapter out of 12 -- less than 15 pages of his 310 page book -- to "Challenging Students to Think Critically." As long as we're businessifying our educational system, let us not forget that What Gets Measured Gets Improved. Current high-stakes tests prioritize measuring content knowledge over critical thinking, and Lemov's Taxonomy aims to improve those measurements.

I agree with Lemov (and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, and so many others) that we need to commit to training teachers effectively if we expect them to be effective in the classroom. Lemov's techniques have been critical to the excellent test scores achieved by Uncommon's students, but let's not trick ourselves into thinking that excellence in test scores equals excellent education. Lemov's Taxonomy is a wonderful and necessary start to preparing effective educators, but for the sake of excellence let it not be an end.