Learning is Change

When I think about all of the ways in which students are measured and monitored, it strikes me that very little of the measuring is being done by the students themselves. Now, I know that others have written on this topic more than I have, but as I was reading through Dan Meyer’s second annual contest for designing of annual reports, I realized that he was doing all of the things that I wished my students would do. I wish my students would collect all of the things that they had done and learned over the course of the year and then construct a report that reflected exactly what they had accomplished. This would not merely be a reflection exercise based upon an e-portfolio, it would be a way for students to prove that they really could quantify their learning.

Rather than us having to assess their learning and turn it into numbers, let’s ask them to do it. Let’s give them the tools and time to create something as beautiful as the Feltron Report. Let’s guide them through the process of figuring out how to make learning concrete. Let’s truly have an alternative to the one sheet for CSAP results as the easiest and most clear representation of the student’s learning.

For examples of great Annual reports, I turn to Dan’s contest from last year. Arthus (who sadly no longer blogs), is a student who was able to visualize his learning:

The level of articulation it takes to construct something truly reflective of a year’s worth of learning is immense. If we start teaching this skill to our children early on, I can’t imagine what they will be able to express.

So, my questions for this are as follows:

1. Is anyone doing this contest with students?
2. What would you have them collect data on throughout the year if you were going to do this (and where would you track it)?
3. What tools would be the easiest to have them express their learning?
4. How could you help them to design their reports so that they are not simple graphs of number of blog posts, etc?
5. What added reflection would you have them do upon completion of this activity?
6. Where would you post them?
7. When would you actually have them do this (end of the year, first of the year, throughout the year)?

I have been thinking a lot about this concept in preparation for The On Button: Instant and Always-On Collaboration, but I don’t know that I ever thought about it in terms of money or value lost… until now.

I believe in eliminating logins because you are walling off possiblilties for your community. I believe in eliminating logins because teachers don’t have enough time to remember yet another password. Logins don’t use the web the way it should be used, pouring feeds together, remixing content and sharing it out again.

Yet, this article seems to suggest that value is lost when logins are involved. When you have true value in your community, logins don’t matter. When you have something that really is “worth something”, putting it behind a login will only ensure that most people will never get at it.

Logins stop the collaborative process short. As much as I love my profile on Twitter and such, I believe that an identity is not tied to a login. I believe that an identity is bigger than a login. If we are creating the right kinds of spaces, with the right kind of respect and safety, we can simply tag our content with our identities, adding value rather than taking it away.

As much as I like this concept, it needs some more thought. I just wanted to share the link and ask the questions: What happens if we remove all of the logins from our lives?

(I also found the link from OL Daily. If you don’t subscribe to that daily goodness, go and do so.)

I hadn’t planned on blogging about this again this soon, but this post from Graham Wegner got me thinking about it again. In this post, he talks about “the popular public schools” that parents move for. He discusses the idea that popular doesn’t necessarily mean good. While I would agree with that, I am caught in the middle of my own process of trying to find the best school for my children. I really don’t think that there is anything wrong with moving to a specific area because of a school.

Being an informed consumer is not a vice.

However, I do agree with the fact that the schools with the best test scores or most popularity will not neccesarily provide the best total education for my kids. I know that there is so much that goes into a single student’s education, much of which is determined by how well he/she advocates for his/her own education.

Although I do believe that you can have a great educational experience at nearly any school, it is hard for me to get away from data and images like these:

vs.

What you see above is the difference in the Math achievement scores between the Cherry Creek School District, which is one of those “Popular Districts”, and the Denver School District, which for the most part is not. While I do believe in taking a look at the school environment and other factors, is it really any wonder that parents would flock to Cherry Creek? Is it really any wonder that they would want to have a better place for their children than maybe they even had for themselves.

So, when I am looking into creating a home for my family, I want the best that there is to offer them. This includes schools. I believe in the power of choice. I will be voting with my feet.

But, I don’t plan on giving up on the Denver schools either. That is what makes me different from many of the parents that Graham describes. While I may be working with my children’s schools to make sure that my kids get the best education possible. I would rather be able to get the kind of education I will get by moving, without moving. I would rather get a world class education anywhere. Is that too much to ask?

So, I was just watching some TV with my 6 month old son while my wife catches a nap, and I saw this ad for Kaplan:

I have to say, except for the fact that Kaplan is basically saying that they have a monopoly on these ideas, I really like the ad. Unfortunately, I’m not totally sure why a for-profit university beat the public school system to the punch. I’m not totally sure why we can’t run ads like this on television or the radio. Why is it that we cannot raise money to change education and then put these ideas out there without a brand associated with them. Why is it that these proposals are being co-opted faster in ad agencies and places like Kaplan then in school districts.

I can just see people using this video in their PD sessions and saying, “We should do this.” Yet, without a support system, they are going to turn to a one-stop-shop solution like a for-profit entity. I can’t help but feeling like this is already happening.

I remember a really great moment in a Podcast not to long ago (I think it was Kevin Honeycutt’s Driving Questions, but I’m not sure) when an interviewee said that the question he is always asking himself is, “Who is getting rich on education? If it isn’t the students, the teachers, or the public, then it isn’t worth paying for.” If the learners aren’t benefiting from the forward thinking of all institutions, then we need to seriously ante up again. So, if there is anyone who has a few thousand bucks lying around, I think it would totally be worth it to invest in some advertising time. But, instead of having the Kaplan tag line at the end, let’s have a link to a network of teachers that are actively pursuing change.

I do still have to give Kaplan credit, though. This is a great ad, and it is the kind of message that most people aren’t being exposed to. I just wish we would have done it first.

Today I was lucky enough to go and visit three Hope Online Sites in Denver. If you are unfamiliar with this program, basically it is a way for students to go to school using online currilum as a major part of their education. However, every single one of the “schools” that I visited today were completely different, and I really enjoed each one for different reasons.

The first one that I went to had an amazing elementary program. The teachers were supplimenting the online curriculum beautifully. One teacher/mentor had thousands of books for kids to choose from in a warm and cozy classroom. It was wonderful to see such thoughtfulness being used when trying to find a balence between computer time and offline time.

The second center I went to was high school only and they seemed to be very focused on getting the kids all of the health and mental services supports that they needed in order to help them graduate. They were much more interested in making sure the kid was safe and keeping their nose to the grindstone in order to ensure their success in the program. It did leave very little time for offline work, however.

The third center I saw was quite frankly one of the best run schools I have come across. They had a huge emphasis on professional development and ensuring that every kid was being tracked and looked after according to their individual needs. They taught arabic as the required language and the online component really only enhanced their already strong curriculum.

These are school choices in Colorado.

I guess I never knew that there were so many different ways that schools can look. Being so isolated in traditional schools, or even in an online school, I think I forget that education can really look different. Now, I would never say that all ways of educating students are good. Nor would I say that any one institution has got everything going right. What I would say, however, is that by looking at different ways of learning, I realize just how valuable choice is.

But, here is where my push for change comes in. I don’t want students and parents to only be making the choices school by school. I want them to be making the choices within every school. I want students to be able to choose an inclusing elementary classroom, a rigorous online middle school curriculum, and a free high school atmosphere (and every possible other combination too). I want students, parents and teachers to be able to design what kind of learning really is going to work for their students and I want all three stakeholders to feel supported in their decision.

I want to be able to make a singular student’s situation better within the school that they currently attend, rather than having them opt in to a different school. But how do we do that? How is it that we can help schools to be able to do everything, to be all things to all kids?

I have been given the task of trying to find ways to pump up kids who are not all that excited about standardized tests. I am supposed to put together a quick reference guide for others who are experiencing a less than enthusiastic response to the CSAP test which comes upon us every March.

The questions I have about this are as follows:

1. Is it possible to excite kids about standardized testing?
2. Is it important or valuable to excited kids about standardized testing?

I know that it is possible to get kids excited about learning. I have seen kids take on extra responsiblities in order to learn more. I have seen students literally leap out of their chairs because they wanted to voice their opinion or had a writing piece to share. Is it really possible to get kids excited about working diligently on an assessment of their learning? Is it really possible to make sitting in a desk and filling in bubbles authentic? (I would say, no… but that isn’t what I am being charged with, is it?)

So, how valuable is it to get kids excited about CSAP? Well, the scores directly relate to school funding, so perhaps it is very important to get kids excited. Perhaps it is justified. Perhaps creating videos to prove that a system needs its kids are completely worth it:

Or, is it possible, that we are going about this all wrong. Is it possible that we are trying to gift wrap a process that is inherently filled with flaws so that we don’t have to deal with those flaws. Is it possible that creating these sorts of resources is simply putting off the difficult work of changing the way we assess students? Is our creativity and resource finding prolonging the life of a process we want nothing to do with?

Or, are we just making Standardized tests a little bit easier to swallow?

Maybe a bit of both. Either way, I’m pretty sure I still have to do the assignment. If anyone has a way to make CSAP more exciting, let me know.

One of the large tasks that I am doing right now is taking all of the courses that our online school taught during the first semester of this year and revising them according to the changes that the teachers made while teaching them. This means that I am copying over any assessments or assignments made, revising any activities introduced and pretty much making sure that every piece of learning is coherent with the next one. While this may seem like a huge undertaking that might not be all that much fun (which, at times, it is), I wonder how many of us are really in a position to look at curriculm this closely. How many of us really get to say that we are revising learning, taking what has gone before and forever changing it into something that works better.

Now, I wish I could say that I did that in my own classroom. I wish I could say that every year I was able to change my curriculum so that it stayed “changed for the better” after I left. However, that could not be further from the truth.

While I was at my previous school, I was able to go from one blogging unit (6 weeks long) to a fully integrated blogging/writing curriculum with teachers and students blogging together on our team. Well, within a few months of my leaving, I realized that the team was no longer using much of the systems that I had set up. Because I wasn’t there to constantly push forward, many of the students and teachers simply reverted back to what they were doing before I joined the team. That is not to say that I did not create a great deal of change, but that the changes were not lasting, at least not in all of the ways I had hoped.

So, what I am proposing now, is that if we are going to make things better in the long term within schools, we must be able to archive everything that we have done and continue to revise it and make it more polished so that if we should ever need to take leave of that role, other can pick up where we left off.

I guess all of the learning objects and project wikis are not enough. We must package learning for others, allowing them to copy it and improve upon it. We must revise our learning continually so that everyone can see the edits we have made and the direction we would like to go.

As much as I might dislike going through each lesson of our online school with a fine tooth comb, I know that it is the only way in which we will get better. I know that any change I make, is one that will stick, one that will make that next change easier.

(As I am reading this post back to myself, I realize how mad I am at myself for not ensuring that more of the work I had done would stick. I really didn’t know how much I was leaving behind…)

I would like to explore if only for a moment the idea that we are all in a major budget crunch. As much as I would like to make a joke about the fact that this is only fantasy, I know that it is head-aching reality for many of us.

With shrinking budget and possibly some layoffs in nearly every educational institution, it is hard for me not to consider just how we can make sure that change doesn’t get taken off the table when the important decisions get made. So, here is my plan:

I propse that we don’t create anything that isn’t scalable (although this isn’t directly related to Stephen Downes idea of what not to create in 2009, I think I should mention it here.). I propose that we don’t create things that require huge amounts of people to maintain. I propose that we don’t build any website, forum, community, blog, portal, LMS, CMS, aggregator, or repository if it only works at a small level or requires huge amounts of time and effort to coninue to expand.

As much as I would like to make sure that I continue to be useful to all of the projects that I create, I would like to stop working on things that require me as part of them in order to work. I would like to make me obsolete as many times as I possibly can. I would like to build self-sustaining learning networks and portals that people do not need to keep on troubleshooting. In fact, every project that I now undergo should follow this plan:

I’m not sure that there is much else to it. If I am building things that require more and more of my time, there truly will never be enough time for everything, and then all movement toward change stops. With all of the downsizing going on, I have a feeling that all programs that aren’t scalable and require specific people are the ones that are most likely to kick the bucket. This may seem counterintuitive. It may seem like by making yourself indespensible to a particular program, you are ensuring that you have a job in the future. Rather, you are just making your program more easy to eliminate, taking you with it.

By making all projects scalable, you can not be tied to any one of them. By continually building new environments and learning more and more from the connections around you, it is possible to become so valuable for your strategies for creating learning that you must be a part of them. Or, at least, that is the hope.

I keep on thinking that because I am learning more and more how to get the most out of my phone, my browser, my email, and my time that others must be doing the same.
 
I mean, how could you not always be on the lookout for ways to do things faster, better, or more efficiently? That is like saying (to me), how could you not be placing yourself on a trajectory of ambition and success?
 
Well, the more that I see those commercials for sprint with the CEO talking down to a majority of americans, insulting them into buying better cell phones, the more I begin to understand that many people are looking to get by on what they have. They may be hopeful that something better is going to come along, but don’t know how or where to get it.
 
I guess what I am saying is that until it is easy for people to find the kind of learning that I seek out every day, it will not become a part of many lives. I can already hear many folks saying that learning is messy or that it is hard, and that it should be both of those things. I think that both of those things remain true, but that accessing the hard and messy learning should not be difficult.
 
If the “House Search of 2009” is any indication, it is incredibly difficult to find out information about neighborhoods or schools that isn’t biased or based upon arcane measures of success. This kind of learning should be at everyone’s fingertips. We should be able to made learning decisions by turning on a dime if we need to change direction.
 
But we can’t. We have to wait and see, on nearly all learning that isn’t fully connected and informed.
 
Well, I don’t want to wait and see. I want overwhelming support of a network that is informing my every decision. I want it for everyone else too.
 
Until that is the norm, I don’t think that we are going to find much change happening within a school, a community, or a cell phone plan.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

This is really my post from yesterday. I was just too tired from the search to post it.

My wife and I were looking at homes yesterday, looking for THE home that we want to raise our children in. We had gone out with our Real Estate Agent before, but this time we decided to have some of our friends babysit our two children before we embarked on a whirlwind tour of Denver Houses. Here are some of the houses that we have considered (and at the bottom is how we found them). I can’t believe how many houses you can see without having to get two kids in and out of the van each time and then chasing your two year old up and down the stairs multiple times.

This time was a little different in other ways too. The first time that we went out, we had low expectations for what was out there and we were blown away by some of the home that have been “sitting” on the market. This time, however, we had high expectations, and they were not even close to being met.

What we want out of our home is a true sense of community. We have known this for quite some time, but we realized on this trip that our yearning for community is not based upon the number of houses, the setup of the blocks, or the amenities around the houses. The community we are looking for is authentic, a community with a common purpose: the creation of environment for growing a family. This means that people care about the public schools, care to go outside and walk, care to talk to neighbors, and care to work for what they would like to see in their community (maintained houses, a lasting value and interest in the families that make up the community). While we found this understanding of community in a few places, mostly it was absent from our search.

To be totally honest, its absence made us feel ill about moving there.

This has to be what everyone goes through when they are picking a school and a community. They want a school that seems to have a common purpose, that cares enough about why the kids are there. They want a school where kids choose to go there. Where the good things written about their school don’t just come from the helicopter parents.

I’m sure that parents look at different things, but really they must be thinking about things like this at all times. If my kids are going to go somewhere for such a significant part of their lives, do I really want to take the chance of them not having the chance to connect their learning from even the earliest ages.

So, I thought that I would open it up to anyone who reads this blog. What are you looking for in an elementary school? How do you find community in the “real world”? Are there any schools in the Denver area that a School 2.0 proponent like me would be happy to send his children?