Alan Singer reports that ETS is adapting its teacher certification. It will replace students with avatars. Computer representations of real students.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/11692858
Why? Pearson is doing it. That’s competition for you. A race to the bottom. Like network television.
There are many reasons to object to th idea of teaching avatars. One is that the essence of teaching is interaction. The teacher and students connecting, responding, reacting. Teaching avatars is like acting without a audience. It can be done, but the actors are at their best when they feel the audience response.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just one point of clarification. This states ETS is doing this because Pearson is doing it. That is not the case. Edtpa has nothing to do with avatars. It looks at real teaching of real kids.
No one has to get permission forms or releases from the parents of avatars. They don’t have any.
Nuts!
Need more specifics.
Could we teach an avatar to . . .
play the trumpet?
paint in watercolor?
read a map?
write a poem?
complete a geometric proof?
conduct an experiment?
follow a volleyball rotation?
understand democracy?
love reading?
balance a chemical equation?
use a microscope?
collect weather data?
take theatre direction?
work cooperatively in a group?
construct a line graph?
follow a recipe?
play chess?
plant a garden?
clean up after themselves?
be nice to others?
wait their turn?
ask good questions?
build a robot or birdhouse?
sew a stuffed animal?
find their niche in life?
become better people?
speak another language?
use conversion formulas?
research a technical topic?
see the beauty in mathematics?
believe in themselves?
describe the causes of the Civil War?
understand supply and demand?
personal responsibility?
Well ETS . .. ?
Maybe an avatar can go out and get a job and pay the rent too.
Do any of the avatars have incarcerated parents, been shot or shot at, suffer from food insufficiency at home, lack glasses or dental care? The list of problems kids bring to school is long, and all personal issues have an effect on the classroom.
The avatars are in use in several teacher ed programs, but the NOTE plan from Educational Testing Service is more complicated that it may seem. Consider these under reported dimensions of the project, a collaboration with TeachingWorks.
“TeachingWorks, is a national organization based at the University of Michigan School of Education dedicated to improving professional preparation for teaching. In late 2015, it received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to establish a Teacher Preparation Transformation Center.“ TeachingWorks is collaborating with ETS on NOTE.
Here is more from the TeachingWorks website. “The Teacher Preparation Transformation Center Initiative (TPTCI), developed by the Gates Foundation, is designed to create a diverse national network of teacher education providers that will build—both independently and collectively—effective pathways for the preparation of beginning teachers.” Diverse? Yes. Effective? Hardly, unless you define “effective” in a manner approved by the infamous National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ). More later on NCTQ
The centers that Gates funded were from a request for proposals–a competition for grants–a rare approach for the Gates Foundation. The other participants in the $6.8 million grants for the Gates funded Teacher Preparation Transformation Center Initiative are:
University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation (U.S.PREP) National Center, based at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX with a focus on district personnel as the key faculty in teacher preparation.
Teacher2, led by the Relay Graduate School of Education in New York, NY; (famous for not hiring anyone with a graduate degree in education, for promoting Doug Lemov no-nonsense discipline, and populating charter schools with teachers).
National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) Transformation Center in Chicago (also a beneficiary of USDE grants), and
Elevate Preparation, Impact Children (EPIC), led by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (with plans to monitor and do a triage on 55 teacher education programs in the state).
One other Gates-funded part of this initiative, created with a $3,248,182 grant (October, 2015), is for the purpose of setting up a Gates approved accrediting system for teacher education. This grant was made to “Teacher Prep Inspection–US, Inc. for this weird Gates-speak purpose: “supporting “the inspection process in a set of Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers providers who are actualizing key drivers.”
The hope is that every state will adopt this model of “inspecting teacher education programs” and replace all other accrediting systems (state or national).
What spurred these Gates funded initiatives? The Gates Foundation has stated that it has little regard for teacher education programs operated by states or by accrediting agencies. One of these is the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). The largest is National Council for Accreditation in Teacher Education (NCATE).
In early 2015, those two competing accreditors were in disarray from disputes about a merger, a practical requirement from USDE. The merged accreditor, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation has become a monster “compliance-or-else” operation, with jargon-filled requirements for accreditation.
These tortured CAEP requirements came from USDE’s policy preferences and its authority to approve one accreditor and one only. CAPE standards were shaped and distorted to accredit on-line and for-profit teacher preparation programs. See http://caepnet.org/standards/introduction
Members of CAEP also faced another specific threat from USDE—cuts to federal scholarships for prospective teachers if CAEP did not allow for accreditation of programs offering alternative certifications. The USDE approval of CAEP as the accreditor of record means that prospective teachers who wish enter a CAEP/USDE approved program may be eligible for support from federal TEACH Grant program. In the midst of this mess, Gates is making a big move into teacher accreditation. Lederman, D. (2015, May 29). CAEP Crusader Ousted. Inside Higher Education. retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/29/teacher-education-accreditor-dumps-its-founding-leader.
This disarray in certifications and accreditations has been accompanied by a relentless campaign launched by the National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ)…an organization with a troubled early history that has morphed into a center of relentless ideological propaganda. NCTQ has the mission of discrediting teacher education for failing to meet NCTQ’s standards and rating schemes, with results published in US News and World report. The ratings are prepared by hired hands who follow checklists and look at documents such as course catalogs and syllabi, and lists of readings. The raters (who must have a college degree) look for “evidence” that matches the exact wording on the NCTQ checklist. The last rating scheme called for an examination to see if NCTQ approved textbooks were used in classes and it there was formal instruction in six specific strategies of teaching. NCTQ is organized to eliminate academic freedom in teacher education and to exercise censorship by intimidation.
NCTQ has six “anonymous” funders. That is a large number. It enjoys support from over 30 foundations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Boston Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Heinz Endowments, J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Walker Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation.
Why do these sources of funding and the National Center for Teacher Quality matter? The new Gates-funded Inspectorate will use criteria from National Center for Teacher Quality for the US Teacher Preparation Inspectorate (US-TPI).
Moreover, the US-TPI accreditation procedure excludes higher education faculty who work in teacher education from any role other than enduring extensive surveillance the inspectors, including intimidation if they fail to be “cooperative” in providing information as requested. The inspectors are all supposed to be experience teachers trained in the inspectorate system and working under a supervisor.
Inspectors will fault programs that fail to track the test scores produced by their graduates. They will fault programs that fail to provide the equivalent of customer satisfaction reports from the employers of their graduates. You can get an idea of the process used in the 2013 inspections here https://secure.aacte.org/apps/rl/res_get.php?fid=835&ref=rl
You can learn more about the NOTE program here. http://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/note
Back to NOTE and avatars. Some of the new competency tests for TeachingWorks “high leverage” teaching skills are being adapted from medical training. In that context, avatars are patients. The physician-in-training is expected to “perform” a series of fairly standard assessments of the patient, analyze the data, make a preliminary diagnosis, and offer a plan for treatment.
The version in education is a virtual classroom with student-avatars. You can see one example here, https://www.mursion.com. Mursion is one of the leading companies in avatar training. It was founded by Mark Atkinson, who previously was the founding CEO of Teachscape for online professional learning, with Danielson’s (infamous) Framework for Teaching part of that portfolio.
I’m skeptical that the avatars will be truly like real students. If they are, then I have no problem with using them to practice teach. But do they have to look like creepy zombies as in the Mursion video?
I like that Gates is dissing traditional teacher ed programs: many of them deserve it. But I have little faith that he has a better way. The Mursion video suggests that it will impart the skill of “teaching difficult concepts”. There is no such skill. The ability to teach a difficult history concept does not generalize to the ability to teach any difficult concept. The reformers seem wedded to the quixotic paradigm that all-purpose skills are teachable. Just as all-purpose critical thinking or reading or writing skills are not teachable to our kids, so all-purpose teaching skills are not teachable to our prospective teachers. While there are a FEW general purpose tricks that can be taught, the core capacity to teach a given subject is deep knowledge of that subject. This cannot be provided in a teacher ed program.
Ponderosa, The focus is on so-called “high leverage skills” most of these are related to classroom mangement/ lesson planning, and presentation of content. See the TeachingWorks website.
Thanks for the link Laura. These are the 19 “high leverage” skills I that Deborah Ball of the University of Michigan touts. It’s all high-falutin’ mumbo jumbo. These are not teachable and measurable skills. Ball wants training teachers to be like training heart surgeons: impart clear procedures and test if the novice can do them. But teaching is a big messy thing; it’s not like heart surgery. She might be able to attain her ideal if she narrowed her focus to say, teaching long division, or the causes of the Civil War. In these cases one can cogently say there are distinct and measurable abilities. But there are few if any meaningful generic teaching skills. My comments in brackets:
1.
Leading a group discussion [90% of this ability comes from content knowledge and basic people skills; this is not something an ed program can help with very much]
2.
Explaining and modeling content, practices, and strategies [this “skill” follows from deep knowledge of the content. The best explainers are the best knowers. Again, ed programs can’t help much here]
3.
Eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking [again, a content-knowledge expert does this more deftly than someone who has a hazy grasp of the subject. Is there really some teachable generic skill for this?]
4.
Diagnosing particular common patterns of student thinking and development in a subject-matter domain [Again, deep content knowledge is the key here]
5.
Implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse and work [Easier said than done. I find that norms and routines for one mode of teaching don’t work for another. Shifting from group work to lecture mode to Jeopardy to computer time to pair work…the norms and routines for one mode don’t transfer. Our whole school aims to instill the routine of writing HW in your planner when you enter class, yet half the kids routinely fail to do this. Unless you radically commit to classroom monoculture, you’re going to get messiness. Most vets I know aspire to tidy norms and routines, but rarely achieve that tidiness. God help the beginner who’s expected to master this skill.]
6.
Coordinating and adjusting instruction during a lesson [This is not a skill that can be taught in ed school. This ability only comes from experience.]
7.
Specifying and reinforcing productive student behavior [Doug Lemov-style tricks have some merit, but many of them don’t fly outside of a no-excuses climate]
8.
Implementing organizational routines [Is this really an all-purpose skill that can be taught in ed school? It seems to me that different groups of kids, different subjects, different mandatory software programs frequently make old organizational routines obsolete. We’re often forced to reinvent our routines. Can ed schools teach routines that will never have to be scrapped, that fit all situations?]
9.
Setting up and managing small group work [I got a lot of advice on this head in my ed school program, most of it bad].
10.
Building respectful relationships with students [This is a very subtle art. Perhaps ed school could give some valuable pointers, but mastery? Come on.]
11.
Talking about a student with parents or other caregivers [Again is there really some all-purpose skill to this?]
12.
Learning about students’ cultural, religious, family, intellectual, and personal experiences and resources for use in instruction [This is a teachable skill? This is measurable? This is an easily understood ideal that ought to become a habit. It is not a skill.]
13.
Setting long- and short-term learning goals for students [I have no idea how to do this. When asked to set a goal for Johnny’s new standardized reading test scores, I pick a number out of the air. We all do. It’s a charade that the reform movement has forced us to perform.]
14.
Designing single lessons and sequences of lessons [Again this “skill” only develops through a dialectic between content knowledge and experience teaching. As you get to know how your kids’ minds work and what they’re likely to already know, you learn what you need to teach and what’s a reasonable amount to teach per lesson. As you get to know the content more intimately, you start to see better what the most logical order for lessons is. There is no teachable skill for doing this. It is a craft developed through experience.]
15.
Checking student understanding during and at the conclusion of lessons [Again, not a skill but a habit to aspire to].
16.
Selecting and designing formal assessments of student learning
17.
Interpreting the results of student work, including routine assignments, quizzes, tests, projects, and standardized assessments
18.
Providing oral and written feedback to students
19.
Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it
My favorite line in Singer’s article: “Just because technology makes something possible, it does not make it a good idea.”
Ponderosa your commentary on Ball’s “high-leverage skills” is right on-point. Every one of them smacks of a square ‘something we can do with technology’ looking to jam itself into a round application.
Teachers are much more than actors interpreting a script. The essence of good teaching is relationship building.
There was something which was not ringing right to me in this story, in a way of disbelief. My nephew, Matt Grossmann, is having a good year with the highly praised book Asymmetric Politics, quoted by many and featured yesterday in Salon. I tell people, yes, Matt is a talented researcher, but I think his wife, Sarah Reckhow is just as talented, She is author of Follow the Money, which takes a very critical look at the role of philanthropy in pushing the charter school agendas. She is certainly not an enthusiastic fan of Bill Gates and the Waltons. So when I spotted the name Deborah Loewenberg Ball, who is director of TeachingWorks and the dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, I thought……isn’t that the school where Matt and Sarah are professors?
I noticed, as I scrolled down the page of Deborah’s “team”, that Sarah did not make the cut. I checked on Sarah’s title: Sarah Reckhow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include urban politics, education policy, nonprofits and philanthropy, and racial and ethnic politics.
Oh. Michigan STATE. I wonder how much they receive from Bill and Melinda.
I spoke with Matt and Sarah in June…..asking them to write something together about the negligence of the media in examining the enormous political issues regarding education.
Sarah had some of her research recommended in a list of clear and forceful response.
Sarah Reckhow, “Beyond Blueprints: Questioning the Replication Model in Education Philanthropy”, Symposium: The New Philanthropy: What Do We Know Now? Society, December 2015, Volume 52, Issue 6, pp. 552-558.
Maybe Sarah and Deborah are friends…but it looks to me like these two schools in Michigan are managing to present some diametrically opposed thinking.
Joe,
I wish Sarah Reckhow would write here about her research. Please let her know.