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.

Motivation in the 21st Century

The testing debate is really heating up this week, with cheating investigations continuing in Atlanta and New Jersey, and teachers in Ogden, Utah, choosing whether to resign or sign a new merit-pay contract. Meanwhile, New York City's mayor Bloomberg has canceled the city's merit-pay pilot program, yet reinforced his support for performance pay in general.

The only good news, recently, on the issue of merit-pay comes from Ohio, where Republican Governor Kasich has made the entirely reasonable decision to hand teachers the task of creating a fair merit-pay process. To comply with Race to the Top requirements, the final plan must include teacher evaluations that weight student academic achievement for at least 50% of teacher ratings. However, if done right, the decision to let teachers design the details could result in a merit-pay system that has the support of teachers because it supports teachers in making the efforts they understand to be essential to their jobs, like collaborating with colleagues and developing relationships with students' families.

I'm encouraged by efforts of politicians to respect and defer to the knowledge and skills of teachers when designing education policy, but I'm having trouble getting truly excited about even a good merit-pay program. Focusing efforts on merit-pay program details begs the question of whether merit-pay is an effective incentive, and if so, what it actually incents. Early studies have shown that offering performance bonuses of 20% of salary might slightly motivate top-performing college students to enter teaching, but any motivational effect on current teachers to change their teaching is unproven at best. A McKinsey study revealed that bonus pay isn't even in the top five motivators for current teachers to consider teaching in a high-need school, and a RAND study revealed that many teachers in NYC's merit-pay pilot program "reported viewing the bonus as a reward for their usual efforts, not as an incentive for changing their behavior."

For another perspective on how to truly motivate creative and thoughtful teachers, check out Vicki Davis's excellent article on "The Freedom to Teach" in today's Washington Post. Davis's thinking is exactly what 21st century students need. As Levar Burton always said on Reading Rainbow, "You don't have to take my word for it!" because a few members of the 'Net Generation would like you to hear it from them:

More Links:

Biz Journal article on Atlanta educators resigning amid cheating scandal

CNN report on upcoming cheating investigations at 34 New Jersey Schools

Deseret News report on Ogden teacher contract

Wall Street Journal article on the new teacher rating system in NYC

Columbus Dispatcher article on decision to ask teachers to design merit-pay process

McKinsey's "Closing the Talent Gap" study

Edweek reports on RAND study of NYC merit-pay

Tuesday Bonus Post: Historypin!

Last night I had the opportunity to join Amy Sample Ward of NTEN Nonprofit Technology Network for the unveiling of the new and wonderful Historypin app and platform. I went intrigued and left enamored; Historypin is a phenomenal and completely free resource for students and educators across the grades and around the world.

I have had an extremely difficult time containing my enthusiasm about this project, and I hope you will, too. Check it out and spread the word!

From their website:

Historypin is a way for millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge story of human history.

Everyone has history to share: whether its sitting in yellowed albums in the attic, collected in piles of crackly tapes, conserved in the 1000s of archives all over the world or passed down in memories and old stories.

Each of these pieces of history finds a home on Historypin, where everyone has the chance to see it, add to it, learn from it, debate it and use it to build up a more complete understanding of the world.

Historypin has been developed by the not-for-profit company We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google.

School, virtually

Just a quick note today about another experiment in education: the growing online K-12 school movement. Louisiana just approved the first two free online charter high schools for the state, and Connections Academy received 1900 applications for 600 spots. The school is appealing to the state to be allowed to hire more staff and enroll 1200 students.

Virtual school programs provide an educational experience that is truly different from the traditional in-person schools. The option is usually marketed to students who prefer independent work, who want to get ahead in their studies, who have trouble interacting socially or experience difficulty controlling their behavior in large classes, or who feel ostracized or bullied in their traditional schools.

Online schools already operate nationwide as private alternatives to public schools, but several states (OH, UT, LA, IN, and TN among them) have begun incorporating virtual learning into their public school offerings as well. This means funding that used to go to traditional public schools now goes to virtual schools.

The trickiest situations occur in states like Utah that fund students to attend traditional schools and online schools, each part time. In that situation, costs f0r the schools are duplicated, but funding is not. Both schools have to maintain student records and process student paperwork and both schools have to adequately staff their classes, despite being only partially funded for some of their students. This is particularly challenging for traditional schools that have a few students attending online classes part time. They lose partial funding for the students, but still have to physically accommodate them in the classes they elect to take traditionally. In contrast, the school does not lose funding when students attend co-curricular college courses during high school.

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