In the article in Sunday’s New York Times magazine about the introduction of Joel Klein/Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify tablet, Klein asserts that those who oppose his views on technology are ideological, not evidence-based.
Klein asserts that we can’t hope to compete with Korea and other nations with high test scores unless we put kids on his tablets.
But here is a contrary view, forwarded to me by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review.
It is an excerpt from Amanda Ripley’s new book, The Smartest Kids in the World:
...But the anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans waste an extraordinary amount of tax money on high-tech toys for teachers and students, most of which have no proven learning value whatsoever....“In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms.” ignore shiny objects Old-school can be good school. Eric’s high school in Busan, South Korea, had austere classrooms with bare-bones computer labs. Out front, kids played soccer on a dirt field. From certain angles, the place looked like an American school from the 1950s. Most of Kim’s classrooms in Finland looked the same way: rows of desks in front of a simple chalkboard or an old-fashioned white board, the kind that was not connected to anything but the wall. Tom’s school in Poland didn’t even have a cafeteria, let alone a state-of-the-art theater, like his public school back home in Pennsylvania. In his American school, every classroom had an interactive white board, the kind that had become ubiquitous in so many American schools. (In fact, when I visited Tom’s American high school in 2012, these boards were already being swapped for next-generation replacements.) None of the classrooms in his Polish school had interactive white boards. Little data exists to compare investments in technology across countries, unfortunately. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans waste an extraordinary amount of tax money on high-tech toys for teachers and students, most of which have no proven learning value whatsoever. As in all other industries, computers are most helpful when they save time or money, by helping to sort out what kids know and who needs help. Conversely, giving kids expensive, individual wireless clickers so that they can vote in class would be unthinkable in most countries worldwide. (In most of the world, kids just raise their hands and that works out fine.) “In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms,” Andreas Schleicher, the OECD international education guru, told me. “I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets.” In the survey conducted for this book, seven out of ten international and American exchange students agreed that U.S. schools had more technology. Not one American student surveyed said there was significantly less technology in U.S. schools. The smartest countries prioritize teacher pay and equity (channeling more resources to the neediest students). When looking for a world-class education, remember that people always matter more than props. Ripley, Amanda (2013-08-13). The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (pp. 214-215). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Man up Joel…where is your research based evidence proving more tablet time improves teaching and learning?
Site your evidence here, right now, today….DO IT!
Like the proverbial snake eating its tail, corporate education reform is also destroying technological investment in education, one of their dreamed of sources of profit.
In Philadelphia, which is in a severe man-made budget crisis, two of its elite schools, Masterman and Central, have announced they are closing their school libraries. From the Philadelphia Inquirer September 13:
“When Central High School opened its new library in 2005 – a $4.5 million research and media hub funded by alumni – Apple named it a national model. Students visited it more than 147,000 times last year, more than 800 visits a day.”
Masterman School’s library, also bolstered by fund-raising, bustled with students, too, from early morning till late afternoon.
But now both libraries – the academic hearts of two of Philadelphia’s most prestigious schools – have been shuttered.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20130913_Budget_crisis_shutters_libraries_at_2_top_schools.html#EVzKMdUbEmZA5ILD.99
unbelievable. What more can you say? sad
As long as we use standardized tests administered to age-based cohorts as a metric we will never know what a “high-performing school” looks like… and everyone seems to base their evidence of “high performance” on test scores. We won’t be able to “transform education” if standardized tests are the only way he measure “performance”.
The technology described in the Rotella article could provide a means of individualizing instruction in areas where the curriculum can be sequenced in levels that are analogous to computer games and provide teachers with data that is far more informative and exacting than that provided by the current standardized tests. The article also described how the use of technology in this fashion could, conceivably, free teachers to facilitate collaborative learning by students— which would get their faces out of the tablets and help them develop the dialogue skills absent from traditional classrooms and presumably absent from technology enhanced classrooms.
It is unfortunate that the privatization movement is leading the charge in this movement toward personalization and individualization because it is diverting attention from the potential ways technology might be used to change the way we teach and measure student learning.
I have a hard time with the concepts of hours of screen time equating to “personalizing” learning. Shouldn’t personalized learning equate to more interaction with, you know, people?
This “individualized instruction” stuff is the argument used constantly by the “reformers” in my state (Utah), who keep pushing these computer adaptive tests. The labs needed for these have taken over the library and pushed teachers out of 3 classrooms and into portable trailers outside. Someone at the state is making it rich!
Anyone using minutes or hours of screen time as a metric for personalization is missing the point… I’m not defending the practices of many technology advocates… but I am open to the possibility that technology can be used to individualize instruction far more effectively than we’ve been able to do so in the past.
Over the top expensive programs, ridiculous and contradictory reasoning, autocratic decisions that leave out the most important stakeholders, lack of evidence for bull-dozer reforms … All this creates such confusion and stress … Is this the ultimate “deform” strategy in and of itself?
Bingo…the answer to your question is YES.
and you can have technology that rules make almost useless. In my new school, I have a small computer lab (11 computers) attached to my classroom, because I teach 3 clases in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program. But it is almost impossible for my students to use them to do research, because the school system’s filtering blocks so many things to which they need access. It even block me, their teacher, so I cannot use my judgment that the site is appropriate and give them access. The latter is in theory changing, but it is not at all unusual for a student in 30 minutes of attempting to do research to get blocked from a dozen sites directly relevant to her research.
Go ahead. Spend money on tablets. If you put textbooks on there so students do not break their backs (several of the textbooks my freshmen advisees have are over 7 pounds!) it might serve a useful purpose. But the tablets will provide no better access to research if most of the internet remains blocked.
The other day, my students were practicing using Citation Machine. One group wanted to cite a book called “The Amateur Astronomer.” When they submitted the title, it was blocked. The reason? The word “amateur.” Say what? (I gave them the credit anyway!)
I was wondering how often the technology breaks or malfunctions. I’ve read about the problems with the technology malfunctioning and the school not having enough money for replacements, etc. I was just wondering if this has become a problem for anyone who has tried to use technology like this in the classroom on a daily basis.
I have not had it as a major issue, although I should probably note there were supposed to be 12 computers in my lab, and one is in pieces because even the students cou;dn’t fix it.
Two years ago, my son was taking the state writing test on a computer. He was a 5th grader, and had stressed about this test to the point that he wasn’t sleeping well. A couple of days after he finished the test, he and several of his classmates were recalled to take the ENTIRE 90 minute test AGAIN. Something had gone wrong and his essay hadn’t submitted. He was SO freaked out. I opted him out of the testing last year.
What we are going to see, teacherken, is a lot of “push” technology, not a lot of “pull.” One makes money by using the machines in ways that limit access. And that’s a great pity because to have a computer with open access to the Net is to have access to a kind of modern-day Library of Alexandria–if that is how it is used.
BTW, I suppose that the on-screen textbooks will get better, but the ones from the big publishers are mostly just terrible now. VERY clunky. Incredibly difficult to navigate. The lit texts, like their print counterparts, BURY the literature in a lot of garbage activities. I’ve had teachers say to me, can you help, I have been looking and looking for the selection but I CAN’T FIND IT. And it would be buried down six levels of folders containing prereading material and activities.
And where are the studies of sustained reading on devices? I know that my experience of that–I’ve done a lot of it–is VERY different from my experience of sustained reading in print. I use the device when I have to do so, though the environmental argument for using tablets as opposed to paper books is, I suspect, strong.
I very much fear that what might have been a positively transformative technology will end up being just the opposite. These “we’re going to individualize the instruction via computers folks” have a decent THEORY, but I’ve looked at a LOT of this adaptive curricula, and most of it is just GARBAGE. Sound bites. Worksheets on a screen. Isolated skills instruction. Nothing sustained. Everything “And now for something completely different.” Everything really dumbed down so that it will fit on a tablet screen with a VERY large graphic dominating the space.
Computers: not the silver bullet everyone expected. Laptops proved equally ineffective. So, using his full powers of higher order/critical thinking/problem solving skills, Joel Klein has his brilliant ah-ha moment: tablets!
Isn’t that like thinking switching from yellow pencils to mechanical pencils will improve student learning?
I agree with teacherken that textbooks on pads will be useful, especially if the textbooks can now be dynamic. My students also like and benefit greatly from screencasts that are easily produced and consumed on pads.
The problem is, unless everyone has a tablet or whatever, having online textbooks is useless. My niece has a class with a totally online book. Several kids don’t have internet access at home and must spend every day after school in the computer lab just to access the book. To further complicate things, there’s something wrong with the log in and no kid can access the book. The teacher is just going along as if they can all get to the book. It’s a disaster.
I agree that electronic books are not useful to students who do not have access to them, but that is the same as paper books. No doubt electronic books will work out best in the wealthy public school districts and eventually become standard in all school districts.
textbooks on tablet are not online. They are downloaded to the tablet. The idea is that it is easier for the students to carry around one tablet rather than 5 or 6 books. Also, in theory one can update an electronic textbook to keep it current rather than having to tally replace it on a 5-7 year cycle. And printed textbooks often now cost in excess of $70.
I am not a great fan of textbooks. I am also not a great fan of simply giving every student a table with textbooks thereupon. I was merely trying to offer the strongest possible case for use of tablets, a case I think is insufficient.
Thanks for the clarification, Teacherken. I didn’t realize that the books were actually downloaded. I also agree that it’s a pretty weak case for tablets.
And TE, doesn’t your argument that this will work well in wealthy districts bother you even a little bit? Wealthy schools and districts already get the best of everything. As a teacher in a poorer school that constantly loses out to the wealthier schools in my district, I’m bothered with your insinuation that this is okay. If poorer schools can’t even get libraries and enough teachers (my school is AT LEAST one teacher down, while the richer schools have class sizes that are considerably smaller), then WHY should we let them get even further ahead in technology?
It does, but the same was true when books were introduced.
And that was almost 500 years ago. Shouldn’t we learn from history and not repeat it?
The book thing seemed to have worked out well.
I signed my classes up for the Prentice Hall textbook online. I put the access code for each class into a Schoology discussion page, and planned a 30 minute introductory activity on the iPads, with the discussion board up on the projector, so students could respond to each other’s discoveries.
It turned out the students could only access chapter 1 on their iPads. We are on chapter 2. If they can log into their same account on a real computer, they see the whole book. So, I guess it turns out the iPads have their own paywalls, and you do have to buy the book (again) and install it.
By the way, Teacherken is using real computers. Anybody who says an iPad isn’t too buggy for classwork, even in instances where a computer would be appropriate, is getting paid by somebody somewhere.
Please, Los Angeles: buy the kids some Chromebooks instead. They’re cheaper. The Vernier Probeware can plug into them, and they can analyse data. Kids can edit text, and even write code on them.
I need to get a few copies of The Smartest Kids in the World and give them to my principal and the Superintendent and assistant Superintendents of my school system. This is the Year of Technology for us. What do schools do with all of their outdated technology devices, anyway? Just curious…
Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.
He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi.
By Pasi Sahlberg
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.
In recent years the “no excuses”’ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school. Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.
For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being. Among 29 wealthy countries, the United States landed second from the last in child poverty and held a similarly poor position in “child life satisfaction.” Teachers alone, regardless of how effective they are, will not be able to overcome the challenges that poor children bring with them to schools everyday.
Finland is not a fan of standardization in education. However, teacher education in Finland is carefully standardized. All teachers must earn a master’s degree at one of the country’s research universities. Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough; only “the best and the brightest” are accepted. As a consequence, teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering. There is another “teacher quality” checkpoint at graduation from School of Education in Finland. Students are not allowed to earn degrees to teach unless they demonstrate that they possess knowledge, skills and morals necessary to be a successful teacher.
But education policies in Finland concentrate more on school effectiveness than on teacher effectiveness. This indicates that what schools are expected to do is an effort of everyone in a school, working together, rather than teachers working individually.
In many under-performing nations, I notice, three fallacies of teacher effectiveness prevail.
The first belief is that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report titled “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. Although the report takes a broader view on enhancing the status of teachers by better pay and careful recruitment this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by its teachers. By doing this, the report assumes that teachers work independently from one another. But teachers in most schools today, in the United States and elsewhere, work as teams when the end result of their work is their joint effort.
The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit. Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team USA certainly exceeded the quality of its players. So can an education system.
The second fallacy is that “the most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers.” This is the driving principle of former D.C. schools chancellor Michele Rhee and many other “reformers” today. This false belief is central to the “no excuses” school of thought. If a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.
Research on what explains students’ measured performance in school remains mixed. A commonly used conclusion is that 10% to 20% of the variance in measured student achievement belongs to the classroom, i.e., teachers and teaching, and a similar amount is attributable to schools, i.e., school climate, facilities and leadership. In other words, up to two-thirds of what explains student achievement is beyond the control of schools, i.e., family background and motivation to learn.
Over thirty years of systematic research on school effectiveness and school improvement reveals a number of characteristics that are typical of more effective schools. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.
The third fallacy is that “If any children had three or four great teachers in a row, they would soar academically, regardless of their racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall further and further behind”. This theoretical assumption is included in influential policy recommendations, for instance in “Essential Elements of Teacher Policy in ESEA: Effectiveness, Fairness and Evaluation” by the Center for American Progress to the U.S. Congress. Teaching is measured by the growth of student test scores on standardized exams.
This assumption presents a view that education reform alone could overcome the powerful influence of family and social environment mentioned earlier. It insists that schools should get rid of low-performing teachers and then only hire great ones. This fallacy has the most practical difficulties. The first one is about what it means to be a great teacher. Even if this were clear, it would be difficult to know exactly who is a great teacher at the time of recruitment. The second one is, that becoming a great teacher normally takes five to ten years of systematic practice. And determining the reliably of ‘effectiveness’ of any teacher would require at least five years of reliable data. This would be practically impossible.
Everybody agrees that the quality of teaching in contributing to learning outcomes is beyond question. It is therefore understandable that teacher quality is often cited as the most important in-school variable influencing student achievement. But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.
Lessons from high-performing school systems, including Finland, suggest that we must reconsider how we think about teaching as a profession and what is the role of the school in our society.
First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools. Singapore, Canada and Finland all set high standards for their teacher-preparation programs in academic universities. There is no Teach for Finland or other alternative pathways into teaching that wouldn’t include thoroughly studying theories of pedagogy and undergo clinical practice. These countries set the priority to have strict quality control before anybody will be allowed to teach – or even study teaching! This is why in these countries teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation are not such controversial topics as they are in the U.S. today.
Second, the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways inaccurate and unfair. It is inaccurate because most schools’ goals are broader than good performance in a few academic subjects. It is unfair because most of the variation of student achievement in standardized tests can be explained by out-of-school factors. Most teachers understand that what students learn in school is because the whole school has made an effort, not just some individual teachers. In the education systems that are high in international rankings, teachers feel that they are empowered by their leaders and their fellow teachers. In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance would be determined by their student’s standardized test results.
Third, other school policies must be changed before teaching becomes attractive to more young talents. In many countries where teachers fight for their rights, their main demand is not more money but better working conditions in schools. Again, experiences from those countries that do well in international rankings suggest that teachers should have autonomy in planning their work, freedom to run their lessons the way that leads to best results, and authority to influence the assessment of the outcomes of their work. Schools should also be trusted in these key areas of the teaching profession.
To finish up, let’s do one theoretical experiment. We transport highly trained Finnish teachers to work in, say, Indiana in the United States (and Indiana teachers would go to Finland). After five years–assuming that the Finnish teachers showed up fluent in English and that education policies in Indiana would continue as planned–we would check whether these teachers have been able to improve test scores in state-mandated student assessments.
I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning. Actually, I have met some experienced Finnish-trained teachers in the United States who confirm this hypothesis. Based on what I have heard from them, it is also probable that many of those transported Finnish teachers would be already doing something else than teach by the end of their fifth year – quite like their American peers.
Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland–assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish–stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.
Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland–assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish–stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.
Magnificent. yes yes yes
Thanks for these superb posts, Mr. Twain!
Here’s how to ENSURE that you will NOT ATTRACT (continue to attract) and keep the “best and the brightest” teachers:
TAKE AWAY THEIR AUTONOMY.
Give them mandated standards, mandated curricula on the tablet and from the vendors approved by the Common Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth;
subject them to VAM;
tell them what pedagogical practices they will have to implement and send goons to their rooms to make sure that these and only these are implemented;
hand them boilerplate lesson plan formats from which they are not to deviate under penalty of death;
measure everything that moves–their success, their students’ success, their school’s success–by means of a horrifically flawed, unscientific, curriculum narrowing and distorting high stakes testing system;
treat vastly differing kids like parts to be identically milled;
make them use “standards” prepared by amateurs;
tell them “no one gives a —- what you think or feel”;
subject them to endless rounds of “trainings” in which they are treated like the non-educable but trainable: sit up, fetch, roll over, good boy.
This is the method GUARANTEED to create a situation in which only those who can’t find an escape route remain in the job.
And this is exactly what we are doing. Every decent teacher I know, just about, is sick to death of it and ready to tell the educrats pushing on them these totalitarian “reforms” that he or she is sick of being complicit in the destruction of U.S. education.
The best and the brightest do not simply want autonomy; they demand it. And every sort of creative innovation flows from their exercise of autonomy.
But perhaps that is not what is wanted for the system of prole training. Perhaps what’s needed for that is people who will ensure that the next generation of proles will dutifully spend their lifetimes doing the equivalent of bubbling in whatever bubbles their overlords tell them to.
There is much in this post that makes sense.
This is just another variation of the “Luddite”—or as it is more popularly known at the EduFraud Bar & Grille when serving up word salad—“You da dummy” argument.
So departing RheeWorld and its ubiquitous Rheeality Distortion Fields that turn logic and facts into “my study, your study, nyah nyah nyah” nonsense and arriving here on Planet Reality—
What do really tech smart and well-to-do people think and do? That is to say, concerning THEIR OWN CHILDREN? Inquiring minds want to know…
Gloryosky! The New York Times gives us a hint!
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The title of the linked piece is “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute” and the first three paragraphs are as follows [this is called a “teaser” so readers will link to the article and read the whole thing]:
“The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.”
What’s that? Don’t understand? Need to turn up the sound? Amplify output?
Ok, but rheeally, Mr. Klein, I’m getting tired of promoting Marxist talking points on this blog:
“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.”
Oops! My bad. Groucho…
🙂
“This “individualized instruction” stuff is the argument used constantly by the “reformers” in my state (Utah), who keep pushing these computer adaptive tests.”
They’re more honest than Joel Klein. The truth is if they’re planning on the teacher using individualized student data the student has to enter the data by using a computer program for instruction or testing or both.
I love how lawyer Klein skips over the student role in this. He’s pretending this can work with the teacher using a “dashboard” but of course it can’t. The teacher won’t have any information from the students unless the students input it or the teacher manually enters it. Since they’re talking about thousands of individual pieces of information it’s obvious the teacher isn’t entering all that info to come up with “individualized lessons”. The students are, and they’re doing that in the course of hours of instruction in front a screen.
They know there will be public push-back to students plopped in front of a screen for hours, so they concentrate on the adult role.
You know, if they truly believed in this stuff, they would sell it honestly. Someone needs to ask Arne Duncan to describe “blended learning”, step by step.
I suppose that over time the online curricula will improve. Certainly, it couldn’t get much worse than a lot of it now is. I’ve spent much, much time over the past three years studying this stuff. A lot of it is “computer adaptive.” The theory is that the system continually monitors the student’s progress and knows exactly what he or she is currently capable of and currently doesn’t understand and so feeds to him or her precisely what’s appropriate–it’s a take on that quite lovely old chestnut, the “zone of proximal development” idea. But there’s a really bad pedagogical concept lurking in most of the stuff that I’ve seen. It’s the idea that learning is mastery of some set of discrete “skills.” Little Yolanda has “mastered” CCSS-ELA-RI.4a and is ready for 4b. And so what one gets, in most of the online curricula that I have looked at is this sound bite approach to instruction. Really GAWDAWFUL. One gets 15-minute lessons that LOOK really pretty–that have fabulous graphics and sound–but ALMOST NO REAL CONTENT. A lot of the Mario the Pizza Man singing the let’s divide it into fractions rap. And any actual kid will just groan and be completely bored by all this stuff ironically created to get him or her excited. I’ve seen a LOT of online curricula that treat the subject being taught as isolated fragments of skills AND as some awful medicine that has to be taken with loads and loads of edutainment.
You seemed to like the art of problem solving.
I think it likely that there will be specialty course providers that will provide a variety of courses that student will use to supliment the courses offered in the bricks and mortar schools.
That’s what Utah wants in all of this computer adaptive testing. The more questions the student gets right, the longer the test becomes. The kids begin throwing the test just so that it can be over. Several Utah legislators own MAJOR stock in computer companies, which should surprise no one.
I haven’t seen the Amplify curriculum, but I have seen some of the Core Knowledge reading books, and those were superb. They hadn’t been infected, yet, by the featuritis that has made the curricula from the big publishers into such a mess, into stuff that looks as though it were produced by gerbils on methamphetamine.
I agree that the Amplify tablets will be a waste of money and, loaded up with canned curricula, could actually hurt kids’ learning rather than help it. I doubt that Amanda Ripley has the answers to improving American schools, though. She was interviewed on the Diane Rehm show recently, and while she speaks clearly and forcefully about her book, it’s apparent she’s laboring under some of the same false assumptions that other reformers embrace. This Huffington Post article by Alfie Kohn was featured earlier on this blog, but it you didn’t get a chance to read it, please do. He doesn’t review Amanda Ripley’s book. Instead, he dissects the conventional wisdom about education shared by the reviewer and most education reporters, politicians, and business leaders. More evidence that the conventional wisdom (on any subject!) is usually wrong: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/education-journalism_b_3817401.html?utm_hp_ref=@education123
I believe the potential for learning with technology is huge, but in my view that potential lies in the sort of learning Will Richardson was talking about in his earlier comments on the blog. Schools can provide kids with electronic tools for making things, for building knowledge and sharing it. That’s all to the good. So far, the technology for “delivering instruction” hasn’t broken new ground. And buying expensive machines for the purpose of testing is just a travesty. I believe technology will be most successful in the context of students creating, connecting, and sharing under the direction of a teacher within a humane environment. In any case, it’s the people that count most, not the machines.
Just a footnote: There’s probably a lot of potential for computer games in education, but there’s lots of research to be done in that field. You’d think that if Legos are educational, Minecraft should be as well. The jury is still out on brain-training video games, but recent research sounds promising.
There’s a really great discussion of the effects of early pattern recognition exercises on the development of fluid intelligence in Richard Nisbett’s SUPERB Intelligence and How to Get It. Nisbett’s primary field of study is cultural differences in concept formation, BTW–very interesting stuff.
Nisbett looks at differences in how kids raised in the US and in Southeast Asia do categorization. Really, really fascinating and profound work.
Robert D. Shepherd:
Thanks for another reason to use the library instead of Amazon. I had to put an embargo on buying any more of the books recommended here.
I NEVER buy the “We have recommendations for you” books. But these online book purchasing sites are very seductive. I end up browsing and browsing, one link leads to the next, and I happen on a lot of great stuff. Sounds like your experience has been the same!
I’m talking about the great books recommended on this blog–too many to buy. But you’re right. I have 85 books “saved for later” in my Amazon shopping cart, but I plan to use that list at my local library.
Describing the data generated by machines as “evidence” that describes human beings, human progress and human value is insulting. The only people who attempt to give weight to this type of junk science are the people who stand to profit from it in some way.
I am unclear about what you are referring to here. What data is generated from machines?
An impressive share! I have just forwarded this onto a friend who had been doing
a little homework on this. And he in fact ordered me lunch due to the fact that I discovered
it for him… lol. So allow me to reword this…. Thank YOU for the meal!!
But yeah, thanx for spending the time to discuss this subject here on your internet site.