The Educational Crisis

Some Useful Websites
NCS-Tech! is a mix of K-8 educational technology resources, commentary, lesson ideas and more, for members of any school community and the world.
Crayola Digi Color is a site from Crayola where your young chldren can choose a type of pen and color and then scribble or write whatever they want.
Classtools.net allows you to create free educational games, activities and diagrams in a Flash! Host them on your own blog, website or intranet! No signup, no passwords, no charge!
Rethink Learning Now is a powerful website where people share their most important learning moments, you can share your story here too!
Neuroscience for Kids is a site where you can discover the exciting world of the brain, spinal cord, neurons and the senses. Do experiments, activities and games to help you learn about the nervous system.

Some Articles to Read
When Teaching the Right Answers is the Wrong Direction
Dyslexia: Some Very Smart Accomplished People Cannot Read Well
Cognitive Scientists Debunk Learning-Style Theories -Scroll down the articles in the blog Inside School Research to access the article.

Thoughts from Yrisarri
I recently read Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them by Benedict Carey in NYTimes.com.  This article is primarily about teaching young children focused math education based upon  brain  and learning research.  Current research indicates that a number instinct is hard-wired into the anatomy of the brain.  Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist believes that

The firing of the number neurons becomes increasingly more selective to single quantities, he said; and these cells apparently begin to communicate with neurons across the brain in language areas, connecting precise quantities to words: “two,” “ten,” “five.”

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds.  Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

There is some research indicating that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sounds until a person is about 11 years old.

I have always believed that the most important part of an early education are affective and psycho-motor learning not cognitive skills acquisition.  My experience and some early studies in learning revealed that by age 8 most children were in about the same place with their reading skills.  Brain research is teaching us that our brains are plastic and although there are optimal learning times for some things, any "learning deficit" is not irreversible.

If our "hardwiring" for sound-letter recognition is not fully developed by age 11, why are we pushing our children to learn to read before the age of 8?  The article in  NYTimes.com indicates to me our children could be much better served by focusing their learning on math rather than reading.  I think that it would be even better if we added second languages, dancing, singing, art and lots of movement into the early learning curriculum creating language rich and non stressful environments for learning.  They will learn to read when they are organically ready and motivated to do so.

It is my belief that we do not have an educational crisis.  The reform that needs to take place in education has to do with adults and their perception of what is important for children and what constitutes success.  Many successful people are poor readers,  yet we are planning to put teachers jobs on the line if they can not teach their classes certain reading skills within a certain amount of time. 

We do have a crisis in our inner cities.  That has been well documented by authors such as Johnathon Kozol.  When children are coming to school stressed from their environment they are not going to be able to learn.  We need to address the crisis in their environment and give them schools where learning does not add more stress to their lives.  When they are ready to learn we need to teach them skills that will lead to their success.

NCLB a Noble but Misguided Policy

 Some Useful Websites
Kids Count Data Center is a place where you can "access hundreds of measures of child well-being" from state data and data across states.
Coalition for Better Education is a site"Created to dignify the autonomy of our children and of their teachers."
Some Interseting Articles
It Is Time to Refocus on Education, R&D and Innovation If We Are to "Think Different"  from the Huffington Post, this article points to the importance of creative thinking. 

Talking to your child about technology is like having the sex talk. Except kids are helping to write the rules  is  a series of articles in the Laptop website about children and technology from a parents point of view.

I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…)   is from a blog by Will Richardson and points out what our children can expect from technology that we don't get.

Thoughts From Yrisarri
No Child Left Behind is a noble but misguided effort to level the playing field for all members of our society.  It is noble by its very mission.  To acknowledge that school has not paid dividends for a some of our citizens is the next step in the civll rights movement.  But the the cure for this problem targets all students in our schools instead of just those in need by gathering data from test results rather than taking constructivist action.

George Siemens recently stated in his blog that the term learning really has no meaning. 

....... our focus is not on some esoteric concept of learning. Instead, the intent is to orient ourselves to a complex set of phenomenon and to plan potential courses of action.

We are always learning, it is a function of our  brain’s reaction to its environment.  Siemens wants to replace the term learning with “sense making “  That should certainly be the mission of our schools in todays interconnected world where every kid will soon have access to all the information in the world on their phone.  I would add that that part of “sense making” is focusing our learning on environments appropriate to our cultural and societal needs as well as individual needs.

NCLB’s cure for what ails education is not based upon “sense making”  but as Dr. Deborah Waber says in an address at a Learning and the Brain conference, the cure is finding deficiencies in subject areas.  Therefore, reading scores are deficient because teachers and students are lazy. So instruction time is increased, tests are given, and failure is punished.   These deficits are seen as pervading all of our schools because there are students who do not succeed in all of our schools.  Instead we should be focusing our intervention on those students who need help by understanding the conditions that have caused them to be termed deficient.

Brain research is clear about the results of stress  on learning.  The data is also clear about who comes to school stressed.  NCLB seems to be based on the philosophy of the Education Equality Project .  They believe, and I agree, that "what happens in schools has a tremendous impact upon the achievement gap in our country".  What I don’t agree with is a one size fits all prescription.  That prescription has led to instructional practices that do lead to later success in life.  Joe Williams from the Education Equity Project in an interview in EdcationNext says,

We keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right

This philosophy seems to ignore the reality of many “deficit” children’s lives and rejects the brain research on stress and learning. Children from low income families are are at risk for educational achievement. Studies find that these children are more likely to experience violence than their middle and upper income peers. All indicators of stress are at higher levels for children from low income families. That puts them at risk for developing the affective skills needed for academic success. Executive capacity in our frontal lobes is responsible for development of self-regulation and if a child can not self-regulate learning becomes almost impossible. Impossible that is until we determine that they have a problem that needs medication.  Stress is cumulative and releases hormones into the brain that inhibit learning. A child’s language development is another predictor of academic success and students from low income families come to school with about 25% of the vocabulary of their peers from higher income families. The good news is that our brains are plastic!

So we can slow down!  Testing is not the answer  especially for our younger children.  It only causes more stress.   We can develop language rich environments with  projects and activities and teach young children to read and other academics when they are ready.  We do not have a reading deficit if we do not expect all children to learn the same thing at the same time no matter the cirucumstances!  We need to help students make sense of the vast body of knowledge at their fingertips rather than force feed information to them.   All kids come to school ready to learn, but we place them in competitive, stressful classrooms and tell them they have deficits before they have had time to make sense of the information they already have.  If we treat our youg chldren as individuals, when they reach the upper grades they will have the skills they need to begin making sense of the larger world!

Social Emotional Learning

Some Interesting Websites
Picturing the 1930s is a site from the Smithsonian Institute that not only teaches about the 1930s but allows users to create documentaries that others who visit the site can view.
ReadKiddoread.com is a web site by James Patterson dedicated to reading. There are many book lists and all types of activities about books and reading.
Kids Activities from Education.com  if you are looking for kids activities to show your child the fun side of learning, from science experiments and math games to writing projects and more, you will find it at this site

Some Interesting Videos
Selling SEL: An Interview With Daniel Goleman describes the importance of social emotional learning in our schools.
I Am What I learn shows samples from The Department of Education's top 10 finalist in this contest.  Presented by ESchoolNews.com
Program Offering Recess Coaches to Schools a segment from the Jim Lehrer New Hour on PBS reporting on a program in the Oakland Public Schools to help students learn to cooperate.

Some Articles to Read
The Heart of Learning: The Value of Cultivating Emotional Intelligence by Ken Ellis
Raise Your Student's Emotional-Intelligence Quotient by Diane Curtis

Thoughts from Yrisarririck
The Social Emotional Learning Quotient

Intrinsically, schools are social places and learning is a social process.  Students do not learn alone but rather in collaboration with their teachers, in the company of their peers, and with the support of their families. 

Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning, Joseph Zins et al, editors

As the educational reform discussion takes place almost all of the emphasis is being placed on academic success for all.  We have goals that all children will be able to read, and do math.  Why don’t we have goals like, all children will learn to cooperate and all children will feel safe?  Those are some of the goals that social emotional learning promotes. Research shows that if students are taught social and emotional skills academic success will follow. 

Research finds that students who receive lessons in appropriate social and emotional behavior do better in school and life. 

Emotional Intelligence Research:  Indicators Point to the Importance of SEL, Eductopia Staff

When I ask people what they liked about school, the answer is almost something about the social emotional side of the schooling.  I liked being on the football team, the chess club, and hanging out with my friends are common answers.  My experience teaching indicated that the students who did poorly in academics had a more difficult time relating to the other students or had lives full of drama preventing them from developing the necessary social and emotional skills needed for success. We should recognize that creating goals to help all children feel secure and promoting cooperation are just as important as goals for reading. 

Social and emotional learning goals need to be an integral part of our curriculum and thinking about education .  CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning have developed a list of five core groups of social and emotional competencies that should be integrated into lessons from grades pk-8.  They are:

Self-awareness—accurately assessing one’s feelings, interests, values, and strengths; maintaining a well-grounded sense of self-confidence
Self-management—regulating one’s emotions to handle stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles; setting and monitoring progress toward personal and academic goals; expressing emotions appropriately
Social awareness—being able to take the perspective of and empathize with others; recognizing and appreciating individual and group similarities and differences; recognizing and using family, school, and community resources
Relationship skills—establishing and maintaining healthy and rewarding relationships based on cooperation; resisting inappropriate social pressure; preventing, managing, and resolving interpersonal conflict; seeking help when needed
Responsible decision-making—making decisions based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, appropriate social norms, respect for others, and likely consequences of various actions; applying decision-making skills to academic and social situations; contributing to the well-being of one’s school and community. 

Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning

I watched  a great show on TV called,  Program Offering Recess Coaches to Schools which aired on PBS’ The Jim Lehrer News Hour.  This program demonstrates a way to integrate cooperative learning and conflict resolution into a school’s curriculum.  Instead of thinking about social and emotional learning as fragmented programs which identify problems, we need to integrate this type of learning into our way of thinking about education and make it a part of each school day for all children. 

Development Based Education

Useful Sites  
Librarians' Internet Index
Refdesk.com
Infoplease

Articles of Interest
Schools Need a Culture Shift is an article by Betty J. Sternberg who addresses motivation in schools.
What the Workforce Will Require of Students is another Education Week article by Catherine Gewertz who questions the need for all students to have college-level skills.

Technology
Here are two short videos from ConnectEd a site for educators from Walden University.  They address topics that have been part of discussions with educators throughout my career.
Why We Need To Teach Technology in School
21st Century Skills: How do We Get There?

Thoughts From Yrisarri
As I listen to the discussions about educational reform I feel that a key concept is missing from the dialog.  I was trained to be a middle school teacher and learned the importance of considering how children are grouped in terms of developmental progress.  That was the impetus behind the middle school movement, that children have a stage between childhood and adolesence that requires a different approach to teaching than children or adolescents. 

I was reminded of this while reading  Scholars: Parent-School Ties Should Shift in Teen Years by Deborah Viadero in Education Week  as she talked about education reform and parental involvement.  She says that there is no mention of how the parental involvement requirements of No Child Left Behind should differ between age levels.  I believe this is the cause of some of our problems in education.  As we discuss public policy we do not recognize the different roles of each stage in the education system.

We only seem to consider that each grade is a preparation for the next grade.  We do not consider that children have development stages and teachers should employ different modes of teaching to capture the interest at different stages.  If the federal government is going to become the source of education policy then they should discuss educating our children not just general education beliefs.

Brain-Based Learning

Useful Websites
Read•Write•Think is a website providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
Academic Earth provides free video courses from leading universities in most subject areas.  You can not get credit, but you can audit some awesome classes from universities like Yale and Stanford.
There is also a complete AP Test Prep course for your college bound students.
The 60 Second Brain Game and Word Wanderer are two games from Posit Science , a  company that provides brain training software.
More Brain Exercise is a site that has tons of interesting facts about the brain and exercises to help develop your brain's potential.

Articles of Interest
Kindergarten crunch: Lack of playtime killing joy of learning, say advocates : Early childhood education is becoming the first step in our stressful public schools.  We are creating high stakes testing for our youngest children! This article promotes the importance of play for kindergarten children. 
A Program Teaches Students What to Believe in the Digital World  This article discusses the topic of media literacy and the News Literacy project that brings seasoned journalists into high schools to help them learn how to interpret the news. 
From Brain-Based Research to Powerful Learning: Innovative Teaching Techniques In the Classroom visits Key Largo, a P-8 school of 1,200 students where all classrooms are wired and where the student-to-networked-computer ratio is 3 to 1.  It demonstrates ways to use technology to put brain-based research to work for our kids.

Thoughts from Yrisarri-Neuroscience and Education
I have always been interested in research concerning how the brain works and learning.  In 1980 my principal at La Plata Jr. High School brought a brain researcher to speak to the faculty and he told us of very interesting research concerning young adolescents and learning.  Since then I have attended workshops with Tim Burns, Eric Jensen and others speaking to this topic.  I believe that what neuroscientists are learning about how the brain works will change the way we teach.

In February LaWanda and I attended the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco.  The Learning and the Brain society is an organization dedicated to sharing information between educators and neuroscience.  They state in their members site that:

educators and neuroscientists share a great many goals. Neuroscience is delving into realms that have pre-occupied educators for years, such as learning and memory, the emotional development of children, the basis of musical talent, bilingual experiences, and dyslexia to name only a few areas of mutual interest.

At the conference almost every speaker spoke to this statement.  Neuroscientists are very interested in using their research to help teachers and are looking for feedback from eduacation to help them direct their research in useful ways.  As I think about what I have learned from my studies of how the brain works, I realize that much of their research reinforces what we already know about good teaching.  For instance, brain researchers have shown that if we want to remember something for a test, we need to practice with the information we want to remember.  Another finding that many educators already know is that vision trumps the other senses when learning new information.  But the brain research goes much deeper than just reinforcing what we know about good teaching.

An important neuroscientist's work that comes to my mind is Robert Saplosky .  His  Great Courses' class Biology and Human Behavior taught me how we are truly unique biological beings.  His presentation made me realize that there is no one way to teach everybody.  When we put students together in a lecture, we are lucky if only a few hear what is said, much less remember it.

Eric Medina's 10 brain rules have had a great impact on my thinking about teaching and learning.  His studies on stress strike me as one of the most important facts about our brains that all teachers should know.  Medina states that stressed brains do not learn the same way and:

Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

I believe that our competitive nature and fear of the future for our children have caused us to create schools that are institutions of stress.  Teachers can cause a child to feel stressed with a look, a few demeaning words or work that is beyond their ability.  We have not created places of safety and security for all children.

The research on memory holds much promise for teachers.  There is no one place that holds a memory.  Memory is a web of nueronal connections that have been prompted by something that can pull them together.  You have to cause students to remember what they already know in order to teach them something new!  In addition,  memories are suspect, brain research indicates that after you learn something you do not recall it exactly as it was learned.  Then, each time we recall that memory it is remembered as it was the last time it was recalled.  Memory is a complex process and if we want students to remember what we teach, brain research can help us understand how to do that.

The concept of the plastic brain is an important for educators to understand.   As Mariale Hardiman and Martha Denckla state in their article,  The Science of Education: Informing Teaching and Learning Throught the Brain Sciences:

Research shows that learning changes the brain. The brain is “plastic”—it makes new cellular connections and strengthens existing ones as we gain and integrate information and skills. In the past decade, the enormous growth in understanding brain plasticity has created an entirely new way to consider how learning and achievement take place in the education of children.

This means that everyone can learn.  The brain can change and adapt to meet the needs of each person.  Almost every child in school can learn what they need to know!

Probably the most important thing for teachers to know about brain research is that when a statement begins with "based upon brain research...." we should be skeptical.  Last week I used the article about Disney refunding money because of their claims about the Einstein Baby videos and learning were false.  There are many brain myths circulating in our culture and we need to research claims of better learning based upon brain research before we purchase programs making those claims.

Are we preparing our students for their future?

Useful Sites for Teachers
Teaching With Contests.com caused me to remember how much my students loved to study using games.  Here is a site full of academic contests students can enter!  In addition, you can find activities for different subject areas, as well as scholarship help and more.
Activity TV is a site that my 9 year-old grandson will love!  It contains hundreds of videos that will teach him how to do something new.  It includes activities for crafts, magic, dance and much more.  Activity TV Jr.  does the same for pre-schoolers.
Black Holes , a part of the Hubble Site, has students making decisions while exploring outer space looking for a black hole.  Great animations of the universe!
Mr. Martini's Classroom has all type of flash cards.  A great place to practice learning math facts in many math topics including algebra, fractions, geometry, the four basic operations and more.

Articles of Interest
Newsweek's Top 100 Books - This is a great list of books that should be read.  You will recognize the name of many books on the list that you will want your children to read.
For Improving Early Literacy, Reading Comics is No Child's Play from Science Daily is an interview with Carol L. Tilley a professor of library and information science who talks about understanding comics as literature. Last Week I provided a site for creating comics called Tap Into The World of Comics  This article points out another important aspect of the comic book.  Professor Tilley says;

Comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of literature, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other types of books.

This School is on a Mission by Grace Rubenstein describes YES Prep North Central. This charter school in Houston's mission is to send every graduate to college.  They are very successful.  I believe it is because they have motivated students (read last weeks blog).  These students achieve that same success at Sudbury Valley School where there are no classes.  YES has a lot of structure and the students come from lower economic background, but motivation is what drives the success of both groups.

Thoughts from Yrisarri
Education Reform and Web 3.0

I began working with technology in the 1960s.  I received an education which enabled me to understand how computers work.  As a library director I filled data bases with information from the card catalog and automated library operations.  Then, as a teacher and as a librarian, I began accessing and interacting with that information.  Thanks to the computer almost anybody today can do what I was trained to do, find infomation and interact with that information with on-line learning or some other variation of research, social, or academic networking program.

So I have worked through Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and the experts say Web 3.0 is on its way.  Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web calls it the "semantic web" which will,

...... enhance every piece of data on the Internet with related 'metadata' . This would, for instance, enable currently passive computer applications to think about the data you enter and advise you.

Wow, I thought my gradparents, born in 1899 and lived to experience the moon landing, had experienced change in their lifetime.  Think about that, you computer will think about the data and it will interact with you!  If I, in my lifetime have experienced such change, what will my grandchildren be wrapping their minds around?

Neuroscientists in their study of the brain have found that our environment literally wires our brain as we grow.  Don Tapscott in Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World speculates that;  

....from ages 8-18, the brain is still being built and that kids’ brains are becoming hard-wired to live in a digital culture.

So my grandchildren are going to grow up with a brain hard-wired to live in a digital culture!  What does this mean for education?  It seems that we have embraced web 1.0, still covet that data base of knowledge, and we use web 2.0 technology to present that data to our students.  But are we preparing our students for their future?

David Nagel, in an article entitled Are Schools Preparing Students for 21st Century Learning?  , reports that there is a "disconnect" between school administrators and parents on this topic. 

The findings were part of a report released this week--Learning in the 21st Century: Parents' Perspectives, Parents' Priorities. They were compiled from data collected as part of Project Tomorrow's annual Speak Up survey, which included responses from more than 335,000 K-12 administrators, students, parents, and educators.

The report says that parents think teachers need more training and schools need more "technology-infused approaches to education".  At the same time more than half of the prinicpals in the survey thought they were doing a good job preparing students for the 21st century.

I think that we need more than "technology-infused" approaches to education.  Our children are already infused with a way of thinking that includes technology.  We need to allow them the opportunity to learn to think about the massive amounts of data they will encounter.  How do they make meaning of all that infomation.  How do they deal with a machine that can think about their problems?  Can you teach them how to do that in 12 years?

The Speak Up Survey also notes that students are gravitating to on-line schools in astonishing numbers. Schools may not even have 12 years to help them make meaning of the data because they will be persuing information that interests them on-line. We must begin thinking about educating our children to think critically and creatively and we better be able to do it in a "technology-infused" manner.

Maybe we should begin treating the students and their parents as customers of the education system.  The education system has a product called curriculum that the customers can peruse to find the best  and most effective deal.  Will they know any better than the educaton establishment what is needed for the future?

Motivation

Useful Sites for Teachers

Tap Into the World of Comics is an on-line slide show by S. Hendy that has links to many different Comic Creator sites and provides 21 strategies for students to use the creators in their studies.  This site has something for students from about 8 years old to adult learners.
Roads to Reading by S. Hendy, a school librarian, provides a number of new book titles for children and adults working with childen. 
Goodreads is another site for people who love reading books.  It is social networking site for readers!  Here you can share book reviews and recommendatons with friends.  Threre are also groups you can create or join to read and discuss a book. 
Web Based Projects is a tremendous site for teachers looking for ideas to help students create better critical thinking skills.  These projects have been collected by the University of Richmond as one of the requirements for teacher education to receive their license.  These projects span all age groups.
Everystockphoto.com is a search engine for free photos.  They come from many sources and are labeled with specific licensing information.  This is a great place to send students doing reports.  Just taking a photo off the internet without understanding the copyright issue is not the way we want our children to learn.

Articles of Interest
Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner? is an interview from National Public Radio concerning the refunds to parents who bought the Baby Einstein videos in the belief that they would make their babies smarter. Dr. David Elkind of Tufts University said it best

I think what Head Start gave people the idea that education was a race and that the earlier you start, the earlier you finish and the better you finish. And that's a wrong idea. But unfortunately, wrong ideas often get you on much more easily than right ones. There's simply no evidence to support it

Teaching Kids to Cheat, is an article in Psychology Today where author Tina Seeling talks about the challenges of evaluating students without using traditional tests. She says,

I read an article a few weeks ago about all the ways kids cheat in school. I was prepared for a long list of terrible transgressions. About halfway through the list, I started to laugh out loud. I realized that almost all of the prohibited actions, such as getting help from other students and looking up material online, are things I require my students to do! As an educator who focuses on teaching students about innovation and entrepreneurship, I spend my time encouraging students how to find creative solutions to problems. They are urged to expand their frame of reference so that they can uncover a wider variety of solutions, to gain insights from everything and everyone they can, and to use all the tools in their midst.

 Get Granny to Google: How the Internet Helps Older Brains is an article I could not resist putting in Education Notes. I worked with technology in the military in the 1960s and have viewed the development of the field differently than many of my teaching peers. Over the years I have taught reluctant educators how to use different types of educational technology. Teaching the use of computers to adults was the most difficult task I undertook during my career. This article reports on a study from UCLA that;

determined for middle-aged and older folks, using the internet, particulalry search, causes enhanced neural stimulation leading to better reasoning and decision-making.

I told you good things would come from learning how to use computers!

Thoughts on Teacher Compensation plus Websites and Articles For Teachers

Sites of the Week

Open Library- Teachers  and  school librarians might be interested in this book website featuring 23,747,948 books (including 1,111,774 with full-text).  Once you have located a book you can browse for purchase or find it at a library.  Some are catalogued and some can be read online.

Watch Know - The Internet is full of useful information, but it's disorganized and often unreliable.  This site is collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website.  Many of the videos feature children sharing their knowledge.

Highlights Magazine - A great magazine has moved to the web and has many interesting games, puzzles, and activities for young children.

Pestworld for Kids - Here is a great site for youngsters interested in bugs.  Checkout the video contest underway that can earn $3000 for your school!

Articles of Interest 

Education Alone Can Not Save Our Economy by Anthony Cody in Teacher Magazine writes the following in his blog Living in Dialog:

Our goal should not be the degree at the end of college. Our goal is knowledge and the ability to do useful, creative and productive things in the world. The quality of education needs to be measured not by how well we get our students to score on tests, but on how capable they are at interacting powerfully with the real world. Are they able to do skillful work? Are they able to express themselves through writing, music and art? Can they invent solutions to the problems that have landed in their laps?

Getting it Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn by Henry L. Roediger and Bridgig Finn in Scientific American Online debunks the myth of errorless learning.  Research shows that learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.  Just remember how much you learned when you went over the test in class the next day. 

Affective Teaching

SITES OF THE WEEK

Meet Me At The Corner is a place where children can take virtual field trips and meet fascinating people from all over the world.  Check out their Big Apple Book Club filled with video book reviews by kids for kids.

Edutopia is a web site dedicated to what works in public education.  There are a number of core concepts presented including Social Emotional Learning, Integrated Studies, Comprehensive Assessment, Technology Integration and Teacher Development.  This web site from the George Lucas Foundation has an online community dedicated to better learning.

Affective Education  Lesson Plans and Resources is dedicated to building classroom communities, social skills, friendship, kindness, self-esteem, feelings, values, and bullying prevention.  Probably the most important aspects of our education system.


Children's Kindness Network is a site for preschool teachers who want help in building a culture of kindness.  This is a place where we all need to start as we reform our schools!

ARTICLES OF INTEREST

As we talk about reform it is important to look beyond the growing culture of data, continuous evaluation and high stakes testing.  These only add to the problems we have.  I believe these are important concepts for schools, but should not be the central focus of reform.  What we have are institutions whose inhabitants, children and adults, are stressed out.  Part of that is caused by the importance of competition in our education system.  It begins in preschool and continues right on through college.  One college professor has developed a system of grading that is cooperative rather than competitive.  Cathy Davidson outsources grading to her students.  This method of dealing with grades puts the empasis on students working together, a real life skill!

As a librarian I was frequently thwarted by our school internet filters.  Getting information to our students in schools is not always easy.  That is why Do Internet Filters Undermine the Teaching of 21st Century Citizenship appealed to me.  In particular the following story sounds all to familiar.
Here we were, a group of educators participating in a professional development seminar trying to discuss the role that Web 2.0 sites can play in civic education - at a presidential library, no less - and we were denied access to the information and tools we needed to have that discussion. My hosts at the library did their best to override the filters, but no one could figure out how to do it. I literally had to pantomime some of the video clips to give them a sense of what I was going to show them - and obviously, I couldn’t do any of them justice. One teacher then offered a tip to the group: if you ever get blocked, ask your students for help - they can show you a number of ways to get around the filter and access YouTube.

THOUGHTS

Education Secretary Arne Duncan had some pretty tough words for teacher colleges at a speech he gave at the Curry School of Education, in Charlottesville, Va., on Friday 10/09.  One of the things he said made me realize that we are missing an important aspect of reform.  Duncan said, " Generally, not enough attention is paid to what works to boost student learning—and student-teachers are not trained in how to use data to improve their instruction and drive a cycle of continuous improvement for their students. ..."  I agree that we do not pay enough attention to student learning, but it is the social emotional learning that we ignore.  Think back on your days in school.  What do you remember?  I bet if you are honest you will remember a social or emotional moment not a particular piece of information.  We have a nation that has to build more prisons to house all of our offenders while we are reforming our schools to make sure all 18 years olds have had Algebra II.  Something seems amiss.

Until we focus on creating a culture of kindness in our schools and teach our citizens how to interact with one another in appropriate ways, Arne Duncan's admonitions are useless.  To improve teaching we need to have teachers who understand children, our culture and the need of citizens to learn to cooperate with one another.

Race To The Top

The federal government is putting its money for educational reform behind a program called Race To The Top. The goals of this program are to:

provide $4.35 billion for the Race to the Top Fund, a competitive grant program designed to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring student preparation for success in college and careers; and implementing ambitious plans in four core education reform areas:

• Adopting internationally-benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success  
  in college and the workplace;
• Recruiting, developing, retaining, and rewarding effective teachers and principals;
• Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they  
  can improve their practices; and
• Turning around our lowest-performing schools.

While these are important goals I believe they miss  half the needs of the children in our education system. A recent survey from the justice Department claims that over 60 per cent of our children are exposed to violence.  The survey found that, “Nearly half of all children surveyed were assaulted at least once in the past year, and about 6 percent were victimized sexually."

Reform that does not address the social emotional needs of our children is not a complete reform program. There are students sitting in our classes that can not focus because their daily lives are chaotic. NCLB has caused us to focus on the competitive nature of our society and provide even more stress for children, teachers and adminstrators. I fear that Race To The Top is more of the same.

While it is important to address academic performance and student outcomes it need not be framed in terms of competition. There were a number of reforms that began in the 90s such as portfolios and individualization. These reforms have been lost in NCLB reform.  With the advance of technology it seems to me that those ideas should be looked at again. We need to reduce the amount stress caused by the high stakes testing that has become the norm.

While we have been ratcheting up our testing to meet international standards, other countries have adopted our ideas of the 90s. Singapore comes to mind. They worked to reduce stress in their schools by developing programs emphasizing critical thinking skills. Yong Zhao, a professor at Michigan State, in a new book, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, draws upon his experience in the Chinese education system and argues that Chinese officials are changing their system to reduce their high stakes admission tests and promote critical-thinking skills. Education Week reports that Zhao says, "Clearly, American education has been moving toward authoritarinism".

As the feds pour money into education and seek national standards our national fixation on fear of "losing" will cause them to replace our system of local control of schools. Graduates of our schools have created the strongest economy in the world with freedoms others do not enjoy.  To limit our freedoms to compete with authoritarian regimes does not seem logical.


SITE OF THE WEEK

National Standards

Common Core
The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers released the first official draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative and will be accepting feedback on the draft until October 21, 2009. This initiative is a set of Core Standards for college and career readiness in maths and language arts. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, has applauded this initiative and stated, "There is no work more important than preparing our students to compete and succeed in a global economy, and it is to the credit of these states that this work is getting done.” I am not opposed to national standards that are process oriented but believe that the problems these standards propose to solve are systemic in our culture not failures caused by the schools. It is more important to address the skills of living in our culture and motivating children to love learning before we set standards that address the problems of universities and career development.

In his article entitled National Subject-Matter Standards? Be Careful What You Wish For Marion Brady wrote “ It will fail for the same reason the No Child Left Behind Act failed—because it will be driven by data derived from simplistic tests keyed to simplistic standards keyed to a simplistic, dysfunctional, obsolete, 19th-century curriculum.” I agree with his assessment of national standards when viewed as a core of knowledge. Standards for college bound students can be controlled by universities. If they have higher expectations, students will meet them. Those who truly want to go to college work hard to achieve their dreams.

A reading of the standards led me to think that we are trying too hard to quantify what we learn as opposed to how we learn. Most of the standards have been in place in our schools for a long time. I guess that pulling them together into a list is a good idea but, I am not sure it is necessary. The standards for world wide competition can be met if we devise an education system of cooperation that individualizes skill development, teaches problem solving and how to find answers to questions. These are skills needed to succeed in the 21st century.

I fear that common core standards will lead us to spend more time teaching a common core of knowledge rather than those skills students will need for the future. I can’t help but think about a video I saw where a teacher was working with a group of elementary students who were developing a project. As she questioned them about their project they would pull out their mobile devices and look up the information they needed to answer the questions and fully develop the project. This points out that the common core of knowledge needed for any project is available to anyone who can use today's technology and knows how to ask the right questions.

The standards that are being developed do not, in my opinion, address the primary aim of our schools. A set of common standards should address the notion of literacy, citizenship and problem solving skills you need in life. Our present aim to send everyone to college is unrealistic just like our expectations in No Child Left Behind. Not everyone is going to go to college or begin a career when they are 18. It seems to me that as our population ages, childhood should be extended to provide life experiences and some time for fun. We are all going to work for 30 or 40 years. Let’s ease up on our kids and let them explore the possibilities of life and develop lifelong learning and coping skills before going to work.

The core standards being developed are more of the same stuff we have been doing since the 19th century. We need some ideas for the 21st century!!

Some Sites of Interest
Flowing Data is a website all about visualizing data so that it can be used. You can't visualize it if you don't find it. A problem I encountered time and again with students doing research was there total reliance on Google for information. It is a fine search engine but there are other places to go. Flowing Data's 30 Resources to Find the Data You Need could be helpful to extend a student's understanding of how to find informtion.

Fighting Drug Use
Teachers frequently encounter adolescent attitudes towards drugs and alcohol that are based upon popular culture's view of their use rather than facts. I was always looking for ways to try to convince my students that children's brains are growing and the use of drugs and alcohol can be detremental to them. They were frequently skeptical. Here are two sites that have some information about the effects of drugs and alcholol on the teenage brain from Scientific American Online:

Marijuana Hurts Some and Helps Others and Is Bad Judgment the Cause and Effect of Adolescent Binge Drinking have some useful information for teenagers.

Some sites for teachers and a thought!

I have been looking at some different websites this week and have some I would like to share with you.

This one struck me because of my recent work as an elementary librarian. I found that my 3rd to 6th graders would play almost any kind of game on the computer. I have found a website that looks a lot like the sites they enjoyed using, but have great value as ways to practice math, reading and other skills. Take a look at gameclassoom.com , I think you can agree that k-6 students will like this site!

As teachers you know that teaching reading really take a lot of your time. One of the areas of reading that does not get as much time as it needs is how to pose questions. This is an important reading comprehension strategy highlighted by Sheena Hervey in her article Who Asks the Questions in Teaching K-8 Online. This is not a long read and will give you some good ideas.

I am always looking for free books on the web and I found a site that is very easy to use to find them. The site Freebook-s.com has a very nice search engine and pulls up books by keyword, title, or author. You may even be able to find some textbooks.

Searching through information you find on the web can be a daunting project. As a former school librarian I found the site Findingdulcinea satisfying. They claim to be the internet librarian and are working to provide your students with searches that are germane to classroom assignments.

A Thought

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School it’s a wonder I can think at all,”
This line from the album Kodachrome by Paul Simon has stuck in my mind throughout my career as an educator. I am always hearing that an education is important but frequently our popular culture belies that value. Throughout American popular culture you can find numerous references to the wasted time people spent in school.

Why is this? The message to students from adults is that school is important, but we let our entertainers tell them something different. I believe one of the underlying problems of education causes this disconnect in our society. As long as schools view the student as a product and our education systems only allow children to learn what has been decided is important this disconnect will exist.

Each of us is different and crave to be treated that way. Schools have to respect that feeling and understand that their product is not the student but the curriculum. That includes delivery of information. Technology has made it possible to create a curriculum that will decrease the dissatisfaction with being in school, we just have recognize what we have!

Instructional Television

Instructional Television has been an interest of mine throughout my career. I have worked both inside and outside the classroom in this field and find it to be a neglected topic today. This blog presents some information and ideas about this topic for your consideration.

Recommended Video Program
I have often been dismayed by students in the U.S. who do not understand the potential of an education while students in other parts of the world will overcome overwhelming odds to obtain an education. I have tried to explain this in schools where I have taught without much success. WIDE ANGLE on PBS has created an award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, which follows seven children - from Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania - who are struggling to achieve what is not yet a global birthright - a basic education. This series of videos will open eyes about going to school. The video made me think about who the next world leaders will be.

To get more information or watch the series go to PBS WIDE ANGLE

Alternative to Channel One
I believe that video and television are important tools in the classroom. One of the companies deeply involved with video in the schools is Whittle Communications who sponsor Channel One News and other commercial promotions in schools ( click here to read an article about Whittle ) As a media specialist I tried to provide alternatives to Whittle’s commercial new programs for teachers. However, Whittle offered free televisions and other hardware that school leaders wanted to acquire. Now, with the advent of high speed internet it is easy for a teacher to develop a program for using the news in their classroom without intervening commercialization. One way to do this is by using CNN Student News. This is a daily news broadcast for students that provides questions and other media literacy information with the daily broadcast. I thin that a teacher who wants to incorporate the news into their curriculum and has access to a couple of computers in their classroom can use CNN Student News.

To get more information go to: CNN Student News

TV Production Skills
In my experience that the most productive use of TV in the classroom is video production. This job is frequently given to the technology teacher (it may be better placed in the drama department but that is another story). Usually students are sent out in teams or as individuals to make a video program about something they think is interesting. This is a good project but it does not really provide an understanding of how TV works.

When I began teaching schools were creating video studios based on the idea that learning to create a studio program might be a lot like work students might be able to find after graduation. It was the beginning of authentic curriculum. In the district where I began working, all the studios were dismantled in the 1990s and computers replaced television as the preferred technology. The computer provides opportunities for different kinds of video instruction and can be a central part of a studio. But, students seldom get an opportunity to expericence video production from the perspective of a team in a studio. Students I worked with who did studio work learned a whole new way of watching television, a spirit of team work and tons new information.

If you are interested in this idea, E school News has a great video about the benefits of students using a studio. In this video students at Minnesota's Eagan High School talk about their experience working with the Student Video Network (SVN) . SVN is a project-based educational program provided to selected schools free of charge by the national news organization eSchool Media. Learn about the opportunity for students to earn valuable video-production experience--and a shot at national recognition for their efforts.

Educators may obtain more information about SVN from Associate Editor Meris Stansbury at mstansbury@eschoolnews.com.

You can read more at eSchool News

Book Review

Daniel T. Willingham is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I have always been intrigued by the question of "liking" school. In my experience most people do not like doing things they do not want to do. School seems to be a place that fits that profile for almost everybody at some time during their education. I disagree with the premise of this book. Children do like school! They like meeting their friends, they like learning new things, they like activities, they like some teachers, they like some subjects, but they do not like all of school every day. In other words they feel about school much like adults feel about work. This book presents some other ideas about "liking" school.

Willingham brings some important ideas to the classroom teacher. As a cognitive scientist he discusses the importance of story, emotion, memory, context and routine in building knowledge and developing learning experiences. He also dispels some cognitive myths that pervade the teaching profession. He shows that learning styles are much less important than the fact that people’s processes for learning and thinking are more similar than different and he provides information about the plasticity of the brain and intelligence.

Willingham’s most important argument has to do with his definition of thinking. He argues that the brain has limitations in terms of our ability to think and that if we do not teach with this idea in mind, children will not like school. His definition of thinking is that working memory receives input from the environment and then connects with long term memory to begin to create new neural pathways that remember this new information in the context of our old information. This seems logical and I think it is a useful way to define thinking.

The limitation is that our brains are not designed for thought, but for the the avoidance of thought. Most of our brain is devoted to seeing and moving and those functions operate efficiently and reliably while thinking is effortful, slow and uncertain. One of the problems is working memory, remember the model of how thinking works? Working memory is at the center of that process. One of the things neuroscientists know is that working memory can only hold about 5-7 thoughts at a time. So if thinking is retrieving information and procedures stored in long-term memory to create something new and working memory has limitations, how do we make thinking easier. Willingham believes that one must know the information and procedures well in order to come up with something new. It is our background knowledge that facilitates thinking.

Despite the brain’s limitations Willingham stresses that hard work in the form of practice pays off. IQ is not totally genetic and has been steadily rising around the world for some time. The message this should send to students is that the only limitations they have are ones they place on themselves. But, this work coupled with lots of practice that is too hard cause students to not like school.

In my opinion Willingham has overlooked the importance of motivation and seems to believe learning core knowledge is at the heart of student success. The pursuit of core knowledge often kills motivation in children. It also seems that a person can only obtain this information in school through hard work and it must be learned at a determined rate to be successful. Students will tell you they like to learn but want to have fun. Willingham believes that if the work is too hard it turns students off and if it is too easy it turns students off. I believe that if the students enjoy most of the work they will not be turned off!!

Verbal Put Downs

In my last post I talked about unkind words at school. How frustration leads to anger causing verbal outbursts which raise stress levels. I believe that stress is one of the primary problems in our schools today.

Verbal put downs are a part of our youth culture. Young people, adolescent boys in particular, are constantly putting each other down. This is different than outbursts of frustrations. It is probably caused by the stress of competition in our schools. Young people have not yet learned the power of words and do not understand the devastating effects of verbal harassment and put downs. The see it as an accepted part of the culture. After all trash talk in sports is all about winning!

"We need to get away from the idea that bullying is always physical. Bullying can also include verbal harassment, which can be just as damaging and detrimental to student learning," said Christy Lleras, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development.

Her study used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study and included 10,060 African American, Latino, and white tenth graders in 659 U.S. high schools. "In looking at whether students felt safe at school, students' fear for their physical safety was actually pretty low. But 70 percent of the students said they were bothered by disruptions in their classroom, and one in five students said that they were often put down by their peers in school," she said.

One of the primary human needs is for safety. This study points out that put downs and verbal harassment at school probably cause stress levels to rise in students causing a climate of fear to exist in our classrooms. Ms. Lleeras speculates that verbal put-downs in schools may be a coping strategy that students use when they don't have the skills to do the work and have little hope of acquiring them in their academic environment.

I believe that as long as competition is at the heart of our educational system, these problems will persist.

You can access the full article at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901105142.htm

Kindness

School has always been a place that gathers frustrated people whose unkind words are often heard on the playground, library, classrooms and the office! John Medina, in his book Brain Rules, has as his 8th rule "stressed brains don't learn the same way."

When frustration is released with unkind words, stress is one of the side-effects and learning is the casualty. The Red Robin Foundation is doing something about this problem by providing grants of up to $15,000 with their U-Act program.

The goal of the Red Robin Foundation U-ACT Program is to encourage kindness among students and help create a sense of neighborliness inside and outside of school settings. U-ACT which stands for Unbridled Acts, or random acts of kindness, is a character-building initiative specifically for middle and junior high schools with grades six through eight, which aims to inspire and energize students about the value of being kind to others.

You can find out more at http://www.redrobin.com/rrfoundation/uactprogram.aspx
|

Ebooks for education

Google, Barnes and Noble and others are preparing digital books and hardware anticipating the educational digital book market. California is testing electronic textbooks that can be viewed on e-book readers and is planning to bring free digital math and science etexts to schools this fall. The move to digital books in schools in education is underway.

As a school librarian I have been anticipating this movement for several years. As printed text books became more expensive and schools invested heavily in technology ebooks seemed inevitable. As I discussed this inevitable change with teachers and other educators, there was a lot of resistance to the idea. Mostly from people who love books (most teachers love to read books) and can not imagine technology can give them the same feeling while they are reading. Students, on the other hand, accept the idea and do not have the same sentimental attachment to printed books as adults. Educational publishers have been producing ebooks for the library and commerical market for a number of years and they are certainly convenient, although in my experience they were not widely read, Many students I have worked with in the last 10 years do not really care to read for pleasure or information.

I have often thought about the impact upon libraries if schools were to purchase their libraries as ebooks. The space taken up by printed materials would be available for other uses and students would not have to leave their class to check out a book. Man hours spent physically checking in and reshelving books could spent in other pursuits. School libraries have already cut back on certified librarians and with ebooks they could probably cut back on library assistants. So there would be a savings of space, use of time and maybe money.

Money seems to be driving the California initiative and it is certainly driving Barnes and Noble, Google and other players in the e-book publishing game. My experience with ebooks in the library is that they are not appreciably cheaper than printed books. They are easier to update and certainly easier to handle but once the printed book is no longer the norm, ebooks will cost about the same as a print book. In addtion, some educational publishers charge a yearly fee for access to their ebooks. States may be able to hold costs down for etexts by negotiating with edubusiness, but I believe there will be other associated costs that will cause the price of textbooks to continue to be high.

What about the ereading hardware? Education will have to be sure that there is a standard format for ebooks and etexts if they are going to use them. Sony has a reader, Kindle is Amazon’s reader and certainly the lure of government money will cause other entrepreneurs to try to dip into the pool. How will schools ensure that whatever they buy can be used with whatever they own? I expect there will have to be a big investment in new technology in order to be ready for digital books.

The investment in hardware will mean more of the budget goes to the technology department. Those laid of library assistants will probably be replaced by more people in the technology department. If my experience in education is any indication, there will be misspent money, unused technology, broken equipment, poorly thought out plans, noncompliant students and resistant educators. The change to ebooks will not happen smoothly nor will it be quick. Most likely by the time all the technology, training and attitudes are in place, there will be a new movement that will replace ebooks.

Ebooks in education are inevitable, I hope that educators and school boards proceed cautiously and do something novel. That is to put learning at the forefront of their educational plans. Right now with print texts and books, we put information at center of our curriculum. All the information in printed books, textbooks and digital readers are only secondary to a useful education in the 21st century.