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Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Nigel Coutts

Educators as Agents for Educational Policy - The Learner's Way - 6 views

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    Education exists in an uneasy domain and the teaching professional is forced to navigate between a multitude of conflicting tensions. Our education systems are dominated by abundance of voices all shouting for attention and offering a solution to the problems they have diagnosed. Each individual claims expertise and insights gained from years as a student is sufficient experience to allow one to speak with authority. - Educators need to find their voice. 
Roland Gesthuizen

Ravitch: No Child Left Behind and the damage done - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 59 views

  • with the active support of the Obama administration, the NCLB wrecking ball has become a means of promoting privatization and community fragmentation
  • NCLB cannot be fixed. It has failed. It has imposed a sterile and mean-spirited regime on the schools. It represents the dead hand of conformity and regulation from afar. It is time to abandon the status quo of test-based accountability and seek fresh and innovative thinking to support and strengthen our nation's schools.
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    "This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch for her Bridging Differences blog, which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website. Ravitch and Meier exchange letters about what matters most in education. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is the author of the bestselling "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," an important critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement that she just updated."
Ann Darling

NAEP Gets It One-Third Right -- THE Journal - 15 views

  • gets, the more the debate will stir and positive things can come of all this.
  • 9 Gail Desler California I look forward to following this discussion! Currently many school districts have the same keyboarding + MS Office requirement for tech proficiency shared above by Interested Parent. I think to continue with that model well into the 21st century is really the train wreck waiting to happen. I've read through the NAEP draft. as well as some of their referenced documents from ISTE, http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/ DOT , and the http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/2 DOT 1stcentdefinition and am hopeful that the NAEP framework will promote the integration of technology literacy across the curriculum. Thanks for starting the conversation.
  • Wed, Sep 9, 2009 Dick Schutz http://ssrn.com/author=1199505 The framework defines technology as "any modification of the natural or designed world done to fulfill human needs or desires." I can't think of any human action that wouldn't fall under that definition The definition of technological literacy is "the capacity to use, understand, and evaluate technology as well as to apply concepts and processes to solve problems and reach one’s goals. It encompasses the three areas of Technology and Society, Design and Systems, and Information and Communications Technology." That's pretty much universal expertise. This is to be measured with a 50 minute test starting at Grade 4. The specs for the tests at Grades 8 and 12 merely get more detailed and more abstract. By the time this gets run through the Item Response Theory wringer we'll have results that are sensitive to racial/SES differences but not to instructional differences. I'll look forward to your forthcoming explanations of how this came to happen.
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  • The problem? Namely, this: With no established federal definition of technological literacy, most states have chosen to follow the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) established by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), and to create their curricula and assessments accordingly.
  • gical literacy that is very different from anything any state or No Child Left Behind (NCLB) envisioned. From the draft document: "In recent decades the meaning of technological literacy has taken on three quite different… forms in the United States. These are the science, technology, and society approach, the technology education approach, and the information and communications technology approach. In recognition of the importance, educational value, and interdependence of these three approaches, this framework includes all three under its broad definition of technological literacy."
  • Geoffrey H. Fletcher is the editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group. He can be reached at gfletcher@1105media.com. Comments
D. S. Koelling

Wikipedia Comes of Age - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 38 views

  • Not all information is created equal. The bottom layers (the most ubiquitous, whose sources are the most ephemeral, and with the least amount of validation) lead to layers with greater dependability, all the way to the highest layers, made up mostly of academic resources maintained and validated by academic publishers that use multiple peer reviews, trained editors, and scholarly reviewers. When the system is effective, the layers serve to reinforce one another through clear pathways that allow queries to move from one layer to another with little resistance.
  • Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research." In other words, to gain context on a topic, to orient themselves, students start with Wikipedia. That makes perfect sense. Through user-generated efforts, Wikipedia is comprehensive, current, and far and away the most trustworthy Web resource of its kind. It is not the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting. In this unique role, it therefore serves as an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web.
  • Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research." In other words, to gain context on a topic, to orient themselves, students start with Wikipedia.
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  • My opinion of Wikipedia, like the tool itself, has radically evolved over time. Not only am I now supportive of Wikipedia, but I feel that it can play a vital role in formal educational settings
  • The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.
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    C. Grathwohl argues that Wikipedia plays a vital middle layer of authority for students conducting pre-research; scholars, he says, should work to assure that links in Wikipeida lead students to more advanced research that's been validated by the academic community.
Martin Burrett

Book: The Student Mindset by @VESPAmindset via @CrownHousePub - 4 views

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    "This book is an effective guide to help plan and execute successful learning. The authors believe that there are five key traits and behaviours that students need to master in order to make their education a success. These five traits vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude need to work in sync to beat the challenges of studying."
Monica Williams-Mitchell

Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Five Questions to Ask ... - 29 views

  • Daniel Pink observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Right-brained directed skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning, will become more valuable (Pink, 2006).
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      YES! We need to address these things. I don't see them as incompatible w CC, however.
  • international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which are mostly left-brained cognitive skills.
  • Common Core does not include an element to prepare the future generations to live in this globalized world and interact with people from different cultures.
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      But does that simple fact prevent us from addressing this? I think not.
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  • Common Core, by forcing children to master the same curriculum, essentially discriminates against talents that are not consistent with their prescribed knowledge and skills.
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      Is this any different from the current situation? Is this author arguing that we should not have common standards, or that we should maintain our current status quo of a patchwork of test-driven standards?
  • A well organized, tightly controlled, and well-executed education system can transmit the prescribed content much more effectively than one that is less organized, loosely monitored, and less unified. In the meantime, the latter allows for exceptions with more room for individual exploration and experimentation
    • Monica Williams-Mitchell
       
      I think the problem lies in seeing this as an either-or question. Any system that relies solely on testing as the measure of success is short-sighted and archaic. Having no identified common ground puts at risk the learners who most need a firm starting point. To say that the current system allows "more room for individual exploration and experimentation" is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. Where in test-crazed American schools do you see this happening??
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    A provocative article by Yong Zhao on CCSS and reflective questions we ought to as ourselves.
Scott Garrigan

USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people's access to writt... - 0 views

  • Right now, in Geneva, at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world's copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners. At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn't want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it's possible for disabled people to get access to the written word? The USA, that's who. The Obama administration's negotiators have joined with a rogue's gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU. Update: Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.
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    Copyright "rights for the user" champion and author, Cory Doctorow, reports on efforts to guarantee rights for the blind and others with reading disabilities to gain access to the printed word. It's happening at the UN's World Organization for Intellectual Property, and it's the first time they are working on rights for copyright USERS in addition to copyright HOLDERS. Read about how U.S. negotiators have opposed this protection for disabled. It's an important issue for educators worldwide, but especially for those in the U.S., whose copyright law has been written to strongly favor corporate interests.
Al Tucker

Education 2011: A case study in seniority-and burn-out - Buffalo Spree - September 2011... - 74 views

  • The following year teachers are required to “map” curriculums, a long process with no apparent functional use. Teaching for Understanding and Cross Curriculum Literacy are two trendy new programs promoting the latest hot topic. Everyone reads Active Literacy before author Heidi Hayes Jacobs arrives amidst great fanfare to promote her comprehensive program, which administrators cherry-pick, then forget. By 2008 the latest buzz-phrase is Professional Learning Communities. The high school adopts this concept at considerable cost and strife. Three years later Principal Power moves on, and PLCs fizzle. With each new initiative Sara’s enthusiasm diminishes. She has twenty-two years of books, binders, and workshop folders stacked in a file drawer, representing hundreds of hours of abandoned work. Sara digs through the strata like a scientist noting geologic eras. She ponders the energy spent on each new program, technological advance, and philosophical shift, and decides the only way she’ll make it to retirement is to stop caring so much. President Obama introduces the Race to the Top Fund, and by 2010 New York has successfully secured its slice of the cash cow. Common Core Standards are developed in 2011, and a system is put into place to rate teachers based on student test scores. Epilogue In 2013 the anti-union movement hits NY State and teacher unions lose the right to collectively bargain. With the help of key Assembly members, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo push through legislation they had endorsed for years eliminating the time-honored practice of laying-off teachers by seniority—“last hired, first fired.” A new math teacher is hired at Sara’s school. Being young and unattached, Bob impresses the new principal, who sees to it that he is not assigned the “problem” kids. Sara remains a competent and dedicated teacher, but the fire is out. She is asked to mentor Bob, but feels no motivation to train the competition. Bob can’t help but notice that Sara shows little interest in the newest reform initiatives. In 2014 a math position is cut due to budget constraints. At half the pay, Bob is clearly the better choice. Sara is laid off, and at age fifty, with a son in college, she joins the unemployed.
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    this article seems to chronicle the last fifteen years of my career - but the characters names are all different.
D. S. Koelling

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

  • 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
  • 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
  • 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
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  • 4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
  • 5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
  • I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
  • Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
  • Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
  • Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
  • One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
Jennie Snyder

Design Thinking in Schools: An Emerging Movement Building Creative Confidence in our Yo... - 46 views

  • design thinking is a set of tools, methods, and processes by which we develop new answers for challenges, big and small.
  • Through applying design thinking to challenges, we learn to define problems, understand needs and constraints, brainstorm innovative solutions, and seek and incorporate feedback about our ideas in order to continually make them better. The more we apply design thinking to the challenges we see, the deeper we strengthen the belief in our ability to generate creative ideas and make positive change happen in the world.
  • If you are interested in finding a program or resources to help integrate design thinking in your school, the directory offers a great set of organizations already listed for inspiration and new connections.
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  • We are living in an age of increased complexity, and are facing global challenges at an unprecedented scale. The nature of connectivity, interactivity, and information is changing at lightening speed. We need to enable a generation of leaders who believe they can make a difference in the world around them, because we need this generation to build new systems and rebuild declining ones. We need them to be great collaborators, great communicators, and great innovators.
  • As we help today’s students build their foundation of core academic knowledge and skills, we also need to look at the ways we are helping our youth build their confidence in their abilities to create.
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