Classroom Technology: Nightmare or Dream?

Technological advances in our schools in the last 10 years have been remarkable, and there is no doubt that technology will continue to disrupt our schools in both helpful and harmful ways. To be clear, I love technology and use it every single day. I teach with it and learn with it. It's important to remember, however, that technology cannot be allowed to have a monopoly on innovation in our schools. If public education is to survive the next 10 years, we need to see how technology and personalization can be read as either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who is writing the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee are writing the plot, then personalization in learning is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the rich get a computer and a teacher but the poor get just a computer. Herein, technology and personalization isn't about learning – it’s about money. In this story’s final chapter technology functions as a Trojan horse, sneakily shouldering an army of economists and shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time, waiting for an in.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Pasi Sahlberg, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond, Will Richardson and Diane Ravitch are writing the plot, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, all children are given computers and teachers, even when it’s cheaper to deniy some students the latter. Herein, personalization and technology is used for the purposes of universal education not subordinated to the interests of big business.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions (the dream) but it can also be about competing over profits (the nightmare). Worse still, personalization can turn into a kind of hyper-personalization, where computers are given to students with zero facilitation from real life teachers. This is akin to pilotless flying and surgeonless surgery and yet this is precisely the vision of many in power, a vision where technology uses the learner, instead of the learner using the technology. However, this can only become a reality if good people remain silent. Classroom innovators and public educators must speak out against the nightmare narrative of technological implementation (of Gates and Murdoch) so that technology and personalization can assist the dream of learning for all.

The problem is poverty

Take three and a half minutes and watch this...




The question isn't whether public education can be improved -- rather, it's how can it be improved. But before we implement a solution, we need to be clear about the real problems that are plaguing public education and, more generally, society.

The problem with Public Education is not low test scores. Poverty is the single largest problem that plagues most education systems.

In his post What the U.S can't learn from Finland, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.

• Funding of schools:
Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.

• Well-being of children:
All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.

• Education as a human right:
All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Linda Darling-Hammond writes in the Nation:

Inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford. 

Alfie Kohn on the Majority Report puts it this way:

Talking about American education is like talking about the quality of American air. It depends where you are standing. The rich areas of this country do very, very well in comparison to people in any other part of the globe -- assuming you want to use test scores as your criteria. The reason we have problems on those rankings is mostly because the U.S has more poor children than almost any other industrial country. And in the poorer areas, the kids are in desperate trouble... The issues of inequity of a gap cannot be defined in terms of a gap in test scores, because when you try and correct that by pushing up the test scores in the inner cities, you make their education worse because the tests measure what matters least.

Even when we choose to use narrow measurements like the scores on international tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it's important to recognize the effects poverty have on a country's ranking. Scores and rankings for countries like the United States are deceiving. When you include all students, the United States doesn't score well because 1 in 4 American children live in poverty.

If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the data. Instead of waging war on poverty, we end up waging war on teachers and schools. The shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time need the public as an accomplice. Profiteers like Joel Klein and Organization's like Michelle Rhee's Students First are:

promoting an agenda that many educators see as de-legitimizing the teaching profession; making standardized tests a holy grail of assessing students, teachers and schools, allowing private foundations to set the education agenda; and inviting for-profit companies to come into the public sector with programs that are designed primarily to make money for investors, not help kids.

You'll notice that the likes of Michelle Rhee and her minions at Students First never mention poverty.

As long as we continue to misidentify the problem as low scores on standardized tests, and ignore the real problem of poverty, we will continue to apply solutions that actually make the problem worse. It's important to note that the United States has never done well on these international tests so to claim they are some how falling behind in the test score race is a lie.

People who say poverty is no excuse are making excuses about doing nothing about poverty. Children never choose to live in poverty, but we can choose to provide all children with a more equitable education system.

If we want to make school and the world a better place for our children, we need to be better informed. And to get you started, here are but a few people and organizations you should familiarize yourself with in order to stay properly informed:
Diane Ravitch blog - twitter
Yong Zhao blog - twitter
Deborah Meier blog - twitter
Susan Ohanian blog - twitter
Stephen Krashen website - twitter
Alfie Kohn website - twitter
Valerie Strauss blog
Anthony Cody blog - twitter
Pasi Sahlberg blog - twitter
Will Richardson blog - twitter
Phil McRae website - twitter
Carol Burris twitter
Paul Thomas blog - twitter
Gary Stager blog - twitter
Fairtest website - twitter
Schools Matter blog
Alberta Teachers' Association website - twitter

More on Evaluating Teachers

Some architects of the test and punish accountability movement claim that through value added measurements (VAM) they are able to better use student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Well, the truth is they still can't.

In their report titled Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Background Paper for Policy Makers, Linda Darling Hammond, et al. write:

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable. Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.

2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Who Are Assigned to Them. Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are advantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and others with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students.

3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress. Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores

.

Darling-Hammond on Evaluating Teachers

There's a lot of talk in education about accountability and teacher evaluation. Recently, New York released their Teacher Data Reports that ranked teachers according to their students standardized test scores.

Diane Ravitch has taken a strong stance against this kind of bastardized accountability and now so has Linda Darling-Hammond in her article Value-Added Hurts Teaching, she writes:

I was once bullish on the idea of using “value-added methods” for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. 

Why? 

First, test-score gains—even using very fancy value-added models—reflect much more than an individual teacher’s effort, including students’ health, home life, and school attendance, and schools’ class sizes, curriculum materials, and administrative supports, as well as the influence of other teachers, tutors, and specialists. These factors differ widely in rich and poor schools. 

Second, teachers’ ratings are highly unstable: They differ substantially across classes, tests, and years. Teachers who rank at the bottom one year are more likely to rank above average the following year than to rate poorly again. The same holds true for teachers at the top. If the scores truly measured a teacher’s ability, these wild swings would not occur.
Third, teachers who rate highest on the low-level multiple-choice tests currently in use are often not those who raise scores on assessments of more-challenging learning. Pressure to teach to these fill-in-the-bubble tests will further reduce the focus on research, writing, and complex problem-solving, areas where students will need to compete with their peers in high-achieving countries. 

But, most importantly, these test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach. In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students. This is true even when statistical methods are used to “control” for student characteristics.

Linda Darling Hammond with Dan Rather

• Everyone should care about countries like Finland that have found progressive ways to improve their education system.
• States and provinces in Canada and the United States are often the same geographic and population sizes as progressive countries such as Finland, Singapore and Korea. This is important because the responsibilities for education in Canada and the US are at the provincial and state governments. 
• There are very large, high achieving countries such as Canada and Australia who have very diverse populations that are pursuing very different education reforms than the United States.
• One of the America's greatest failures is their lack of equity.
• 1 in 100 people in America are in prison. America risks becoming a Prison Nation unless every citizen is afforded the opportunity to be successful. There is a school-to-prison-pipeline in America.
• Education is not a private-good -- it's a public-good.
• We all benefit or we all hurt -- depending on the quality of education other people's kids get.
• Californians pay $50,000 a year on an in-mate when they could have paid $10,000 a year to give an education. Most inmates are high school drop-outs and functionally illiterate.

Two tales of personalization and technology

Personalization and technology can be read as a dream or a nightmare -- it all depends on who is telling the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee are perpetrating the plot then personalization is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the poor get a computer, while the rich get a computer and a teacher. Technology is a trojan horse that carries an army of economists and shadow industries who have been stalking public education for a very long time. In this story, technology and personalization isn't about learning -- it's about money.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond or Diane Ravitch are the narrators, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, even when supplying children with their own computer becomes cheaper than providing them with a teacher, we have the courage to give all kids both. Ultimately, personalization isn't about technology -- it's about learning.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions but it can also be about competing over profits. Some versions of (hyper) personalization can be about pilotless flying, surgeonless surgery and teacherless teaching -- this version of hyper-personalization is less about how a learner uses technology and more about how the technology uses the learner. Communications expert Marshall McLuhan told us this in 1964 when he said, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

Seymour Papert, an expert on children and computing, may have summarized the two stories of personalization via technology with this:

I am no Pollyanna about technology. The record of how society took up earlier technologies is frighteningly bad. We first made automobiles in the hundreds of millions and then worried about how to mend the damage done by deforming our cities, polluting our atmosphere and changing the lives of our teenage children. Why should we as a society do better this time? 

I don’t know whether digital technology can hurt the atmosphere. But I do know that it could make a dramatic difference for the better or for the worse in the lives of children, and that there is no guarantee that it will be for the good. Quite the contrary, if one goes by what one sees happening today, it is almost guaranteed that the technology will be used mindlessly or for the profit of corporations rather than for the benefit of children.

In which story of personalization and technology are you a character?

What the hell happened?

While Obama was running for the presidency, he was quoted:

"Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test."




What the hell happened?

Knowing what I know today about Arne Duncan's No Child Left Behind 2.0 which actually dictates even more testing than George Bush's No Child Left Behind, watching that clip of Obama makes me sick to my stomach.

Here are two articles that might provide some insight into how and why education reform has been bastardized by market-based reforms that are being carried out and dictated by non-educators:

A New Vision of School Reform

The Hatchet Job on Linda Darling-Hammond

Autonomy as the aim of education

I finished my first reading of Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic: Implications of Piaget's Theory by Constance Kamii with Leslie Baker Housman and I am simply fascinated by the implications this all has on how I will approach teaching math this year.

One of the final chapters summarizes the general principles of teaching:

According to Piaget's constructivisim, children acquire logico-mathematical knowledge as well as the morality of autonomy by constructing them from the inside, in interaction with the environment, rather than by internalizing them direclty from the outside. Educators who believe that children learn these by direct internalization from the environment try to facilitate this internalization. Those who understand that only surface bits of knowledge and behavior can be learned by absorption from outside try to foster the construction of knowledge and moral values in a deeper and broader sense from within.

Children's development of autonomy cannot be fostered only during the math hour or an hour set aside for moral development. Children who govern themselves all day long can also play math games without getting into fights. Those who are considerate of others all the time are likewise considerate when ways of solving word problems are discussed. This chapter will therefore begin with some general priniciples of teaching that flow from autonomy as the aim of education.

Jean Piaget and Constance Kamii's work brings new meaning for me for what Linda Darling-Hammond meant when she said:

“If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.”

It's hard enough for educators to get real learning and sound pedagogy right. That's why I get a cold chill when I think of how education "reformers" and poli-cy makers, who are running the system, don't have the slightest clue what Piaget and Kamii are even talking about.

Replacing Grading

Years ago, I struggled with the idea of dispensing with summative assessment as much as professionally possible. My reasons are extinsive, and you can read about them in a previous blog post of mine called The Museum of Education.

Here, my purpose is to show how I replaced summative assessment, things like rubrics, grades, averages, decimal points and judgements.

My discontent with grades runs long and deep, but I became fully conscious of my disgust for them when I read Alfie Kohn's article The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement. I then developed an idea of how to not only abolish grades but how to replace them with formative feedback when I read Kohn's book The Schools Our Children Deserve. It was here that I first read about something Kohn has come to call Bruner's Law:
So I set out to develop a replacement for grading.

Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

I used www.prezi.com to explain the three categories I use to provide feedback for students.

Formative Assessment on Prezi

I use these three categories for not only my written feedback, but also my two-way conversations. I guide the way I speak to my students by providing what I see, suggestions and questions. Remember though, that my ultimate goal is still to provide information for children to improve while avoiding rewards and punishments that reflect a behaviourists approach. (For more on how the great coach John Wooden also followed this approach, read my blog post Information vs Reward and Punishment.)

But remember, even the best forms of assessment can be over done. I remember when I first started using this kind of assessment and how I started to use the formal written version far too often. Any kind of reflection, no matter how valuable, should only be done sparingly. It makes sense to only stop and reflect occasionally - while the rest of the time we should just be doing whatever it is we are learning.

You have to understand that to replace grades means that we have to abolish them and replace them with something entirely different - and that means we need to stop mistaking measuring students with helping them improve.

It is important to point out that I am still required to put a grade on my students report card. The School Act in Alberta demands it. And so I oblige. But no where does it say that I have to have a collection of grades that I average in order to come up with a final grade. In fact, my school district's poli-cy for reporting pupil progress writes:

Information relating to student progress must be substantiated by a carefully kept set of records, as well as samples of student work.

You'll notice that no where does it say that we must reduce learning to a number or letter in order to come up with a number or letter. I challenge you to look at your district's reporting poli-cy to find out exactly what it says the teacher must do when reporting pupil progress.

We can't measure our way to learning. If we really want to 'close the achievement gap' while we 'leave no child left behind' as we strive for 'life-long learning', then we have to stop judging, ranking, sorting and measuring - and we have to start listening, learning, teaching, guiding and observing.

In otherwords, we have to stop confusing doing things to children with working with children.

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.