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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?

The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.

the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:

1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.

2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.

3. Students tend to think less deeply.

4. Students may fall apart when they fail.

5. Students value ability more than effort

When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.

The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.

the problem with tests is not limited to their content.

if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.

the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.

research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

project-based learning

highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.

When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.

“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

fact-finding

problem-finding

Next, idea-finding

there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connectionsCharting Debatable IssuesListing Facts/Questions/ResponsesIdentifying Cause and EffectSupporting Opinions With FactsTracking The Five W’s and an HIdentifying Multiple Points of ViewIdentifying a Problem and SolutionComparing With a Venn Diagram

The One-Pager:Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned.

“Popcorn Reads”:Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily.

Illustrations:Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn.

always evolving

We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.

no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

outside ears, and eyes, are important

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.

The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.

teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.

must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.

most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.

The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.

So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.

“What worked?”

“How could you help her?”

“What else did you notice?”

something to try.

three colleagues on a lunch break

Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.

“listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”

coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is

trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.

a whole list of observations like this.

one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.

watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.

routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.

I know that I’m learning again.

It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.

modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things

coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

funded

where all the new teachers might come from

where all the new teachers might come from.

If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.

Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.

Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.

say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.

hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.

will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.

will help.

we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.

became necessary when it was blatantly apparent that not all students in U.S schools had equal opportunity to learn

standards are necessary but insufficient

depends on teachers and leaders knowing how to expertly implement them

high-stakes testing that accompanies the standards

Administrators need to take the lead

Become discerning readers and writers.

Do more read-alouds of excellent literature.

Standards do not transform teaching and learning

Organize curriculum through emphasizing big ideas and important concepts.

Embed shared experiences in your teaching.

re-order

order in which the four modules may be used is not critical

ocus and emphasis on the types of texts

What changes

is the

analytic reading

examining its meaning

read and reread deliberately.

understand the central ideas

supporting details

entails the careful gathering of observations

overall understanding and judgment

omparison and synthesis of ideas

drawing on relevant prior knowledge

suggests that educators select a minimum number of grade-level-appropriate short texts

as well as one extended text

in lower grades, chosen texts should include content from across the disciplines.

upper grades, content-area teachers are encouraged to consider how best to implement informational reading across the disciplines

present their analyses in writing and speaking

all students need access to a wide range of materials on a variety of topics and genres

students improve both their reading comprehension and their writing skills when writing in response to texts.

notes, summaries, learning logs, writing to learn tasks, or even a response to a short text selection or an open-ended question.[9]

hese responses can vary in length based on the questions asked and tasks performed, from answering brief questions to crafting multiparagraph responses in upper grades.

narrative story and narrative description

creative fiction, as well as memoirs, anecdotes, biographies, and autobiographies

include writing under time constraints

writing over multiple drafts

generate writing pieces in response to teacher-provided prompts and to their own prompts

For reading and writing in each module

Understand and apply grammar:

Cite evidence and analyze content

Understand and apply vocabulary

Conduct discussions and report findings:

grades 3-5

two standards progression charts for each grade level

Writing

peaking and Listening

Graham, S., and M. A. Hebert. 2010. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education.

suggests both the number and types

Students

offer one way of organizing the standards

quarterly modules

reflects the integrated nature

four sections

to express an opinion/make an argument or to inform/explain

write

citing evidence

analyzing

grammar

vocabulary

discussions

reporting

Teachers and students alike report that for today’s students, “research” means “Googling.”  As a result, some teachers report that for their students “doing research” has shifted from a relatively slow process of intellectual curiosity and discovery to a fast-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.

  Second and third on the list of frequently used sources are online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, and social media sites such as YouTube. 

 94% of the teachers surveyed say their students are “very likely” to use Google or other online search engines in a typical research assignment, placing it well ahead of all other sources that we asked about

e databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR, or Grolier (17%) A research librarian at their school or public library (16%)

In response to this trend, many teachers say they shape research assignments to address what they feel can be their students’ overdependence on search engines and online encyclopedias.  Nine in ten (90%) direct their students to specific online resources they feel are most appropriate for a particular assignment, and 83% develop research questions or assignments that require students to use a wider variety of sources, both online and offline.

Teachers give students’ research skills modest ratings Despite viewing the overall impact of today’s digital environment on students’ research habits as “mostly positive,” teachers rate the actual research skills of their students as “good” or “fair” in most cases.  Very few teachers rate their students “excellent” on any of the research skills included in the survey.  This is notable, given that the majority of the sample teaches Advanced Placement courses to the most academically advanced students.

Overwhelming majorities of these teachers also agree with the assertions that “today’s digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans” (87%) and “today’s students are too ‘plugged in’ and need more time away from their digital technologies” (86%).  Two-thirds (64%) agree with the notion that “today’s digital technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically.”

There is now minimal support from the research community for the use of annual test scores in teacher evaluations, often referred to as VAM.

When teachers begin losing their jobs based on test scores, how easy will it be to attract excellent teachers to schools with high degrees of student mobility and/or truancy? Who will want to teach English language learners with interrupted education, or students with emotional disabilities that make their performance on tests unpredictable?

tiring work for the kids

dives into the packet

It's a way of labeling books based on the skill needed to read them.

kids here have leveled libraries

counterbalance to the tough stuff

seems to engage the kids

d. Or, to

we are cognitively blind to disconfirming data and challenging ideas.

To innovate, people have to take their normal thinking to a much higher level. Most of us have to be taught how to do that.

Fear of failure, fear of looking bad, and fear of losing our job if we make mistakes all can lead to what Chris Argyris called “defensive reasoning”: the tendency to defend what we believe. This makes it hard to get outside of ourselves in order to “think out of the box.”

most organizations exist to produce predictable, reliable, standardized results. In those environments, mistakes and failures are bad.

To innovate, you must simultaneously tolerate mistakes and insist on operational excellence.

Humility, empathy, and the devaluation of hierarchical rank were critical to making this new culture work.

Research  Teaching students to research is a common standard across all grade levels, elementary, middle school, high school, and beyond. Diigo excels as a research tool: Students can save relevant websites to lists in their Diigo student accounts. Each saved bookmark captures the URL and a screenshot, and can be searched later. Students can highlight important information right on the website, using Diigo. Later, when students return to the website, they find the reason they saved the bookmark in the first place. Students can use virtual sticky notes to summarize the important points of information from the website. This activity will mimic the time-tested procedure of using note cards to summarize and organize research projects. Students working on similar topics can create and join groups in order to collaborate. Later, when students need to document their sources, Diigo can be used to recall website URLs for citing sources.