By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

There is a phishing scam going round via Twitter direct messages sent from already compromised accounts. The message says something like “Is this (from) you?”, followed by an apparently legit link, but which redirects to a scam page that asks you to log into your Twitter account.

If you do, the phisher can in turn use your account to send the same message to all your contacts. And so on. The problem is that the phisher can also use your account to send other messages, like: “I’ve been robbed while I was in X on holiday, can you send me some money I’ll repay as soon as I get home”, for instance.

So, just as with e-mail phishing scam, the best way is not to click on the link. But if you’ve clicked, not to enter your account data unless you are rock-sure the request is from twitter. And if you have entered your account data, to change your password as fast as possible, and warn your contacts about the scam.

That’s what I am doing with this post, because I got caught too.  I realized it a few seconds later and changed the password for the ETCjournal twitter account immediately. Although  no direct messages were apparently sent from that account during these few seconds before I did, it seems safer to send this warning.

In general: the tweets from the ETCjournal twitter account are automatically generated from its two feeds, Entries RSS and Comments RSS, via twitterfeed. So any twitter message by ETCjournal that does not bear the mention “from twitterfeed” should be considered a priori suspect.

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

The comment period for the $650 million Department of Education’s “Investing in Innovation Fund,” referred to as i3, has ended. An article in Education Week discusses the main thrusts of these comments. For the entire text of the proposed priorities, click here.

Some large urban school districts object to small rural districts being favored. Small rural districts have problems with devoting resources to writing such complex grant applications and with conducting the studies requested in the guidelines. A requirement for 20% matching funds from the private sector, including foundations, has also received criticism because of the very short time frame. Some districts complain of the “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) requirement.

My perspective is that of a small business president. For this purposes of comment, it only matters that I have been working on innovation in education for over ten years and have encountered just about every road block to having schools use my innovative services as you can imagine.

The i3 guidelines allow three different types of proposals: scale-up grants of up to $50 million, validation grants of up to $30 million, and development grants of up to $5 million. The last of these requires a two-stage application process and does not require the high level of studies with proven results that the other two do.

Here’s the description of the scale-up grants. (Emphasis added.)

Scale-up grants would provide funding to scale up practices, strategies, or programs for which there is strong evidence (as defined in this notice) that the proposed practice, strategy, or program will have a statistically significant effect on improving student achievement or student growth, closing achievement gaps, decreasing dropout rates, or increasing high school graduation rates, and that the effect of implementing the proposed practice, strategy, or program will be substantial and important.

Validation grants are described in the following way. (Emphasis added.)

Validation grants would provide funding to support practices, strategies, or programs that show promise, but for which there is currently only moderate evidence (as defined in this notice) that the proposed practice, strategy, or program will have a statistically significant effect on improving student achievement or student growth, closing achievement gaps, decreasing dropout rates, or increasing high school graduation rates, and that with further study, the effect of implementing the proposed practice, strategy, or program may prove to be substantial and important.

Click the image for the PowerPoint presentation.

This is how development grants are explained.

Development grants would provide funding to support new, high-potential, and relatively untested practices, strategies, or programs whose efficacy should be systematically studied. An applicant would have to provide evidence that the proposed practice, strategy, or program, or one similar to it, has been attempted previously, albeit on a limited scale or in a limited setting, and yielded promising results that suggest that more formal and systematic study is warranted. An applicant must provide a rationale for the proposed practice, strategy, or program that is based on research findings or reasonable hypotheses, including related research or theories in education and other sectors.

Only school districts and nonprofit education businesses may apply. Entrepreneurs who provide tools are not eligible.

Note that the largest awards require “strong evidence.” Those districts that choose to submit “scale up” proposals must include innovations with this evidence. “Strong evidence means evidence from previous studies whose designs can support causal conclusions . . . and studies that in total include enough of the range of participants and settings to support scaling up to the State, regional, or national level . . . .”

It’s a very reasonable assumption that most of the new, innovative tools for education will come from small businesses. In the difficult education marketplace, having a new and better way to provide some aspect of education provides an edge over large existing businesses. The large education companies have an established way of doing business and usually will not seek change unless forced to do so by the market.

The i3 guidelines, however, are skewed toward large entities by their requirements for studies, which are quite expensive to carry out.

The i3 guidelines, however, are skewed toward large entities by their requirements for studies, which are quite expensive to carry out. My business has not been able to do a study and most of those I’ve looked at have the same problem. This basic problem seems to pervade many federal and state operations. The large businesses that can afford lobbyists, studies, extensive marketing, and other activities not accessible to their smaller kin get the bulk of federal largesse.

Besides, education studies often have flaws. I’ve seen two studies produce opposite conclusions on the part of the investigators. Generally, education studies compare a new method or device in classrooms with the status quo. Of course, the teachers and students know that they’re doing something differently and react to that fact as well as to the actual new method or device.

The “new math” was studied and found to be the great savior of our student mathematical literacy. What happened? When rolled out at scale, it just didn’t work, and a generation of students was hobbled in its mathematics learning by this idea. Suddenly, it was “back to basics” again.

The i3 study requirement is therefore doubly flawed. Studies do not produce reliable black-and-white results. Understanding their data requires very knowledgeable people and often they will conclude only that the new idea may help students. It’s much too easy to bias the study results in the direction that the investigator wishes.

The second flaw in the requirement is the institutional bias that such requirements have against our greatest innovators, small organizations and individuals. The greatest new idea in education could be out there right now seeking acceptance, crying in the wilderness and unheard by the districts, agencies, and foundations. You can be sure that a number of good ideas are struggling to be recognized.

The i3 program also appears to assume that innovation will come from within schools. But schools tend toward inertia. An entire system of school districts, state departments of education, and colleges of education has been built to keep things stable, to avoid change. Good ideas have originated within schools to be sure. However, this approach of the i3 program ignores our greatest resource, entrepreneurship. The program should reward schools that reach out to the entrepreneurial community to find new, exciting, and innovative ways to improve education.

We do not know yet what we’ll see in the final guidelines. However, none of the comment summaries in the Education Week article suggest a movement toward encouraging entrepreneurship. If we’re to make a real difference in education, we must engage all of our resources including the most powerful agent for change we have. While, as an entrepreneur myself, I am biased, I believe that the facts support my conclusions.

Let’s engage all of our national resources in this important effort.

Across the U.S., colleges and schools are facing unprecedented budget cuts. A web search will erase any doubts that the problem is exaggerated or just a bump in an otherwise smooth road. Here are a few articles that surfaced in a quick search:

• Elizabeth McNichol and Nicholas Johnson, “Recession Continues to Batter State Budgets; State Responses Could Slow Recovery,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 20 Oct. 2009
• Jack Stripling, “Insult to Injury,” Inside Higher Ed, 2 Nov. 2009
• “Are State Budget Cuts Affecting the Quality of Public Higher Education?“, Education-Portal.com, 16 Oct. 2009
• “Universities Set to Rally Against Budget Cuts, Pay Cuts, and Tuition Hikes,” Fightbacknews, 9 Nov. 2009
• “The Challenge to States: Preserving College Access and Affordability in a Time of Crisis,” The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 10 Mar. 2009
• Terence Chea, “Budget Cuts Devastate California Higher Education,” Associated Press/KPBS, 5 Aug. 2009
• “Budget Cuts Cripple California’s Universities,” National Student News Service, 19 May 2009.

To encourage discussion on this national (and perhaps international) crisis, ETC is publishing three articles:

• The Education Budget Crisis: Is It Necessary? by Jim Shimabukuro

• Job Security Is a Powerful Argument Against Change by John Adsit

• Tough Decisions for Extraordinary Times by Harry Keller

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

According to the latest headline, the University of Hawai`i system is facing a $76 million budget crisis that threatens “massive cuts to programs, departments and schools”[1]. Yet, the state recently announced that $203 million has been released to the UH for capital improvements.[2]

The same holds true for the public schools. At a time when budget cuts are forcing layoffs, pay cuts, furloughs, and program reductions, the state is releasing $75 million for — you guessed it — capital improvements.[3]

I’m aware that UH is not alone and that countless colleges and universities around the country are facing similar hard times and budgeting practices. Thus, when I refer to UH specifically, I’m also referring to all the other higher ed institutions that are suffering similar fates.

For me, the fundamental question is, Are physical structures such as classrooms and offices so essential to education that they must take priority over programs and staff? Or put another way, When push comes to shove and we’re forced to choose between the two, do the buildings win?

Perhaps 20 or even 10 years ago, the answer would have been yes. Without campuses and buildings, education would be impossible.

But today, with online programs flourishing, the answer has to be a resounding no. Education is already being delivered online via strategies that don’t require expensive classrooms and offices. In fact, nearly all the physical structures that make up a traditional campus are superfluous for totally online classes. Students and professors can work from anywhere: home, dorm, coffee shop — wherever they have an internet connection.

To its credit, the UH isn’t completely oblivious to the potential of online learning. To address the severe budget cuts, the chancellor has begun a system-wide planning process to prioritize efforts, and under “D. Maximizing resources,” we find “Explore greater use of technology–enhanced learning (distance learning) to increase access to learning opportunities and achieve savings”[4]. The fact that this is last among the six priorities in this category is telling, I think.

The problem, I’ve been told, is the state’s funding process, which treats capital improvements as a separate budget item. Colleges and schools aren’t allowed to reallocate CI funds to other uses. Thus, we face the very real prospect of offering students well-maintained as well as new buildings but severely truncated programs.

But what if . . .

What if the funding process were made more flexible and colleges were given the power to use all or most of the CI funds in innovative ways to save or restore the programs that are now in danger of being cut or curtailed?

If this actually happens, how would we ensure that the funds would be used wisely?

My bias is toward pouring the funds into electronic infrastructure, staff reorganization, and resources that would mazimize a college’s completely online strategies and offerings. In my mind, the money’s there for colleges to thrive, but only if they’re willing to take the leap from physical to primarily virtual structures.

Given the freedom to decide, are colleges ready for this leap? Or would they still opt for capital improvements?

Needless to say, gravity is probably strongest in the middle, where the pull is toward a collegial splitting of the funds between CI and online, But the real danger in this kind of non-decision is that we may simply perpetuate the status quo, watering down the real power of the funds and going through the motions of changing without actually changing and ensuring that the we’ll travel all the way back to where we are now.

__________

1. Dan Nakaso, “University of Hawaii in Crisis Over Deficit,” Honoulu Advertiser, 9 Nov. 2009.

2. “$203M Going to Physical Improvements at UH,” Honoulu Advertiser, 7 Nov. 2009.

3. “Public Schools to Spend $75 Million on Improvements,” KPUA, 5 Nov. 2009.

4. Virginia S. Hinshaw, “Preliminary Recommendations on Prioritization,” University of Hawaii: Communications, 8 Sep. 2009.

By John Adsit
Editor, Curriculum & Instruction

As I noted in one of my past articles in which I mentioned the problem the computer giant DEC had with creating critical improvements in its computers, the problem lies in the fact that an incumbent system, created to better accommodate an existing situation, acts to perpetuate itself even after the situation changes. That comes about for two reasons.

The first is simple resistance to change, both psychological and legislative. We have always done something one way, and we are used to it. We also have systems, rules, and regulations that have to be changed, and that requires convincing people who are not experts in the change situation that the change is necessary and beneficial. That has already been mentioned, so I hasten along to the second point, the one on which I wish to dwell.

Many people may remember the staggering improvements made decades ago at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, a school with almost complete Hispanic enrollments, with 80% on welfare, which went from the poorest imaginable academic success to unbelievable (to the College Board, at least) academic success in only a couple of years. One small part of that improvement, the efforts of math teacher Jaime Escalante, was depicted in the movie Stand and Deliver. While that movie did a good job depicting Escalante’s work, it failed to show that he was a part of a school-wide revolution, a revolution brought on by earth-shaking changes in the educational process.

One of those changes was instituting a rule that students could not take elective classes if they were below grade level in the key academic areas of reading, writing, and math. As a consequence, the school went from 12 art teachers one year to 2 art teachers the next. That was great for student academic achievement, but it was not so great for the 10 art teachers who lost their jobs. It took a lot of courage for the leadership to override the obvious objections and still make those changes.

I saw the same thing first hand when I was involved with an effort to do something similar, but on a much smaller scale, in a high school. Like almost all schools, such decisions were not made by any one person; they had to be determined by the school’s shared decision making body—in this case the department chair council. All attempts for change proposed by the four key academic departments (English, Math, Social Studies, and Science) had to be approved by the entire council, and those four votes were regularly opposed by the other 17 departments. (Yes, that’s right. Some of the departments represented one teacher or even half a teacher.) Any serious attempt to focus on academic achievement in the core content areas meant a very real threat that we would lose enough jewelry, typing, or vocal music students to cost someone a job. Any proposal that threatened that was a non-starter.

In one whole faculty meeting, an art teacher stood up and said, “I’m against this because it could cost me my job, and if you vote for this, you could be voting to take away my job.” It was the most effective argument anyone made on any side of the issue.

Similarly, when the school board of this very large district considered cutting back on bus transportation, the entire body of employees in the transportation department—a shockingly large number—came out en masse to make sure such a travesty could not be considered.

Whenever any change, such as Jim descries, is considered, we have to remember that a very substantial percentage of people are invested in that status quo, and they will do everything in their power to make sure it is maintained. There are a lot of people whose livelihoods are tied up in capital improvements, and you can be sure they will do whatever they can to keep those funds flowing.

If you want an example, turn on your television today and see how long before you get an urgent appeal from the health care industry trying to make sure that these horrible (to them at least) changes in the health care system are prevented.

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

Consider that the board of trustees of a university must be conservative or else that university will not endure. They’re supposed to take the long view and to continue to do things as they have been done for decades or even centuries. Contrast that attitude with corporate America’s narrow focus on next quarter’s results much to our national detriment. Ordinarily, I’d say that the university is making the better decision.

However, these are not ordinary times. For hundreds of years, higher education has, at its root, remained fairly constant. Students live at a university, attend classes given by sages, take tests, and have a social life that they’re unlikely to repeat later in life. The university was intended to be a place apart designed to imbue young adults with certain ideas without the distractions of living in society.

The Internet now threatens that ages-old constant in a manner not previously seen even with the impact of highways, automobiles, radio, and television. Most of us would agree that the hope exists for a better education world based on broadband communication. We are seeing some experimentation with these ideas in universities now but not too much. There’s been lots of paper saving and some bureaucracy trimming. Some institutions now deliver online courses. For example, Troy University located in an out-of-the-way area of Alabama makes most of its income from online courses including a contract with eArmyU.

The online courses are taught by adjunct professors, a nice way to say that they were unappreciated and underpaid. The regular faculty, at least those with which I had contact, obstructed efforts to expand the online program. They were not interested in having that online sideshow invade their hallowed halls. As John Adsit suggests, they are very much wedded to the status quo.

Unless they’d like to end up like the music industry, universities had better make plans and investments today. Higher education is a very large industry with lots of money up for grabs. If established universities drop the ball, there are plenty of organizations ready to pick it up. Jim’s bias toward “electronic infrastructure,” etc. is exactly right. Furthermore, universities should be thinking like some planners in Detroit who are considering demolishing entire neighborhoods outside of the city and converting them back to farmland. As lecture halls and classrooms become disused, how should that space best be utilized? What will higher education look like in twenty years?  That’s a short time in the history of many universities.

By John Sener

Disclaimer: I am both uniquely qualified and perhaps ill-suited to write a review of this conference. Uniquely qualified as Director of Special Initiatives for Sloan-C and as one of a handful of people who have attended all 15 Sloan-C conferences; ill-suited because of the possibility of “bias” but also because, frankly, I spent most of my time there as usual talking with colleagues rather than attending conference events. So this will be a more impressionistic review of the conference rather than a comprehensive one. In reality, the conference has gotten so big that it’s not possible for a single individual to provide a complete review.

Up front, one new development is worth noting in particular: tweeting. I started tweeting at conferences earlier this year, but this was the first time for me to do so at a Sloan-C conference, and I did so throughout. The evolution of the tweetosphere even over the past few months is remarkable. People were coming up to me afterwards and thanking/complimenting me for my tweets; I found myself scanning session rooms to find fellow tweeters posting on the same presentation; I was able to get tweeted summaries of other presentations without attending them or being burdened to find print handouts; and I even met someone new because I mistook them for a fellow tweeter — so it’s becoming a notable social undercurrent at many conferences. Oh, and tweets make great notes for preparing articles like this one . . .

The person primarily responsible for bringing the Sloan-C conference into existence, Dr. Frank Mayadas, was the keynote speaker. Frank offered a three-part view of the current state of online education: retrospective, current, and future. The retrospective piece was of course gratifying for us “old-timers” who always appreciate the opportunity to reflect on just how far we and the field have come. How in the early days (in my case, pre-World Wide Web) we cobbled together makeshift or relatively primitive products (e.g., Lotus Notes, First Class, Web Course in a Box, Allaire Forums) to create online courses, while remembering the first Sloan-C conference where everyone knew everyone else (95 participants) and there were two presentations for each concurrent session.

Fast forward to the current conference with almost 1400 attendees total, including ~170 virtual attendees, and 40-50 presentations per concurrent session. Online higher education has entered the mainstream and continues to grow at a brisk clip thanks to the development of a lively practitioner community capable of rapid response, along with the growth of a healthy vendor community which has provided tools to fuel online education’s growth. But what about its future? Dr. Mayadas called for online education to reach truly full scale (as also reported in this Chronicle of Higher Education article), which would likely involve additional changes to the current landscape, such as more targeted government support and greater attention to making online education attractive to a much larger proportion of faculty.

Unlike many conferences which are struggling with conference attendance due to budget crises and constraints, this conference actually grew in size relative to last year, with a 5% growth for onsite attendance and 20% overall growth for the conference including virtual attendees. On Thursday morning, I “convened” the plenary session for the virtual attendees, which meant I monitored the computer feed (messages and questions), responded to any transmission issues as well as I could, and relayed any questions or comments to the speaker during the Q&A period. Although it was difficult to know from the messages, it appeared that many if not all of the virtual attendees were finding value in this presentation at least; and as one virtual attendee noted, virtual attendance was good not only for his budget but also for his waistline, as he was eating a lot less food than if he were attending the conference in person. ;-)

The speaker, Andrew Keen, has attained some fame due to his book The Cult of the Amateur, and his self-professed aim as a “polemicist” was to provoke thought and discussion through expounding his contrarian positions, for instance:

• The Internet poses a danger precisely because it makes education too inexpensive (cheap/free).
• Educators’ authority is based on the authority conferred by their hard-won wisdom and must be maintained; kids don’t really know anything of value (i.e., wisdom).
• The Internet’s real-time speed prevents thoughtfulness, which is another challenge to educators.

Needless to say, Keen’s talk provoked a fairly lively Q&A session (and evoked strongly contrasting reactions from attendees afterwards). It would have been nice if he had understood his audience a little better; at one point, his speech was proceeding under the assumption that most of his audience were tenured faculty, so he seemed a bit surprised when he actually polled his audience to find that very few (<10%) were in fact tenured faculty. All in all, however, Keen succeeded in his goal to provoke thought and discussion about the issue, even if IMO he missed a golden opportunity to have a more nuanced discussion of the issues with an audience that was more sophisticated about the issues than what I suspect he customarily faces. Then again, perhaps his aim was more on target: over the past several years the Sloan-C conference has evolved into a conference which attracts a large proportion of first-timers, and this year was no exception, with perhaps as many as 50% of the attendees being first-timers (based on a show of hands at a plenary session).

I also attended several concurrent sessions which reinforced for me that online education continues to evolve, expand, even backtrack in a myriad of directions. One of them had a “back-to-the-future” feel for me, as the presenter was advocating a return to modularized learning management systems as an alternative to the current crop of LMSs and their relative inflexibility and drive toward being enterprise-level solutions. The discussion at another session on learning objects reminded me that we were well past the days of attendees looking for wisdom from pioneer presenters; instead, the audience is often at least as knowledgeable as the presenter(s). That session generated a side conversation with an attendee about a particular learning object repository solution her institution was using, so I did that in lieu of attending additional sessions that afternoon.

______________________________

During the panel, I had an epiphany of sorts, realizing the extent to which online education has provided an opening for private sector companies to become more deeply involved in higher education.

______________________________

The next morning, I served on a panel discussing the issue of relationships between higher education and the corporate sector, specifically vendors serving the online higher education market. During the panel, I had an epiphany of sorts, realizing the extent to which online education has provided an opening for private sector companies to become more deeply involved in higher education. Some may react to this insight with a “duh!”, and to some extent I also wondered why it took me so long to realize this. I’d been more focused on the other unanticipated effects of online education on higher education, such as the creation of higher, more concrete standards and expectations for course quality and instructor involvement.

Later that morning, I attended a session which described research showing how the Quality Matters project has positively impacted its users several years later. After the session, I got involved in yet another extended  “shop talk” discussion. No doubt I missed lots of good conference sessions, and indeed that’s now unavoidable. But for me the great value of this conference has been, and continues to be, the quality of interaction with long-time colleagues and meeting new ones. In other words, for me the conference is a non-stop schmoozefest.

Some would say this is a highly ironic observation to make about an online education conference. I would say that an in-person conference is an excellent form of tribal gathering to touch base with those numerous colleagues with whom the primary relationship is an online one. Virtual conferences are on the rise, they already have some advantages, and they will only get better. In-person conferences may be attended less frequently, but they are not going away anytime soon — at least if they maintain the quality provided by events such as the Sloan-C conference.

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

John Adsit (Collaborative Leadership Is Essential for Change) has hit on the primary issue with individual teachers. They say, “What I am doing now is working.”  They say that even when it’s demonstrably untrue. It’s a simple litmus test for bad teachers for the simple reason that there’s always a student who could use something different. You never reach perfection in education just as you never have a final theory in science.

Several people have alluded to the necessity for good leadership, leadership that will challenge the teachers who believe that they have reached the final plateau and that everything is working. What happens to businesses with that attitude?  Good leaders must lead and must lead with a vision of what’s coming in the future. They cannot rest on laurels or stick with good enough. Then, they must transmit that vision to their people and find ways to motivate them to improve continually.

Consider that even if a teacher has created the perfect course today, that course will not be perfect tomorrow. Yesterday’s students listened to transistor radios and watched maybe an hour of television a day on 9-inch black-and-white sets. Today, they text constantly and watch hours of incredibly diverse television programming each day. Yesterday, they mailed hand-written letters and waited days for replies. Phone calls outside of the local area were expensive. Today, they have instant communications and can call Europe from the U.S. for free.

______________________________

No matter how resistant to change teachers may seem to be, it’s there in the classroom that change must take place.

______________________________

When your target audience changes, your strategies for creating learning must also change. The perfect becomes imperfect, although the perfect never really was perfect.

Leaders face the problem of predicting the future. Which of many options for improving education do you embrace?  What should you change and what should you retain?  Generally speaking, you must distinguish between strategy and tactics. Find learning strategies that have stood the test of time, that have been working well for a long time. Two examples are discovery and creation. Most people, and especially younger people, love to make new things and to discover new ideas.

Another strategy is paying personal attention to students. Make them believe that you care. Also, challenge students so that they aren’t bored. However, don’t worry about entertaining them. That’s not a teacher’s job. You’ll have to be more specific regarding the particular material that you’re charged with teaching of course.

Changing tactics means finding different ways to involve students in learning. How do you use skills that they have developed and that didn’t exist a few decades ago, skills you may not have? Which old-fashioned ideas still resonate?

No matter how resistant to change teachers may seem to be, it’s there in the classroom that change must take place. If students are bored, the teachers are too. They’d love to have the opportunity to make their jobs more fun and rewarding. Leaders must show them the way so that they become the solution and no longer are seen as the problem. Don’t expect teachers to do this on their own just because a few have. They face many uncertainties and long hours to build change and often are unrewarded and even criticized for it.

By Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Editor, Policy Issues

I always liked that discussion about the body falling down the stairs and how it looked from various perspectives. I consider myself a change agent and that got me called into the office, moved from school to school, and actually allowed me to work for the President of the United States.

The answer is not on the page

KidsNetwork National Geographic and the laser disk programs I had (old technology) made me think in new ways, especially when the kids wanted to know why they couldn’t use the technology that I was using, computers, digital cameras, story boxes, etc. With laser disks, you could capture frames and create presentations. I also had a lumaphone from Hawaii somewhere, and we could see the people we talked to. This was revolutionary. You know what? Even though that stuff is old hat and we have moved on, there are people still looking for the answer on the page.

So what changed was me. I was not looking for the answer on the page. The kids were free to think, read, and use other sources. Dr. Hilda Taba did this without the technology. She used pictures. But that was way before the Internet. There have always been people seeking to create change. Change is chaos to many and quite frightful.

Perhaps you used to be a teacher and you learned what was in the book, so you dropped the book or lost it — easily replaceable — and you could look every kid in the eye while standing your ground. It takes courage to do anything else. I don’t believe I know how classroom management is taught for computer use, nor do I know how people estimate the variables of change over populations not used to being given permission to think, explore, search. That’s a whole discussion for another day.

How do you manage different populations of students using technology?

I learned classroom management for technology through NASA and National Geographic. The Challenger Center and various groups demonstrated and taught as much as they could about different approaches. Earthwatch did some of this too. Everything you teach is not going to be interesting, but there are different ways of teaching.

I made up my own matrix, a game, some books, a classroom display and resources, a field trip, and local and international resources. But I can cheat because I live in Washington, D.C. What expert is not available to me? What gadgets and gizmos, intriguing laser disk lollipops, giant insects, lizards walking on water, astronauts coming in to tell kids how they got started? With the magic of multimedia, though, you can have access to the things that go on in D.C. In fact, most of this stuff have migrated to the web. Now the problem is that there is too much information and too many things to do, and someone has to make choices.

I used the standards that I knew, and the students and I would apply them in reviews of their individual and group projects. Not hard to do except for the first time. I sent home the objectives I wanted to accomplish at the start of every big unit. A mistake?

No. Three things happened. Parents who could help, did. Parents who did not understand or know about the topics asked to come in to learn it and help me. (That was scary, at first.) Kids who were not in my class, unfortunately, wanted in on some of the action. You can see how I was a nuisance.

We did the Challenger Center’s Marsville project in my class. I asked other teachers to be a part of it, but they refused. At that time, I almost had an accident while going home. As I rounded the curve in the neighborhood, I saw a giant Marsville that my kids had built for their friends.

Teaching as a passion

For social studies and geography, I did a study of the Chesapeake Bay, the great shell bay. The Fish and Wildlife Service helped me with field trips; National Geographic had a video and lesson plans, and the map was wonderful. We read sections of the book Chesapeake and learned more than the three paragraphs in the social studies book. We knew the history, the science of the estuaries that lead to the sea, and we seined for crabs, did water turbidity and salinity studies, and examined microscopic organisms. Click here for the lab part — where I work.

One teacher told me that when they decide how to do technology and get it right, she would make an effort to learn. I suppose she is still waiting. Another teacher I knew watched me and asked to be a part of the project. So we worked together. This woman was such a good teacher that we joked she could teach the dead to read and write. No kidding, she could get a child up to grade level in about a year. Immigrant kids.

Deloris Davis. What she did was not to do all the work. We had a parent committee who did most of it for us. I never thought of that.

Teachers in Hawaii — I went there to learn about the long canoes. I have a friend from New Zealand who is a book publisher. I studied Hawaii, the islands, and the history in depth because if you are a National Geographic trained teacher that’s what you do.

Lately there is always more to learn

So there is Web 2.0 and the new Blooms Digital Technology and TPACK. You can see why teachers who are used to a book might run screaming from the room.

In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Henry Jenkins talks about the new skills:

• Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking— the ability to search for , synthesize , and disseminate information
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives , and grasping and following alternative norms.

The school system did not like National Geographic, NASA, Discovery Channel, and others coming into my classroom to film because it made the other teachers feel bad. The teachers did not want to do the work, which I understood. Converting to technology is no easy task. It requires more than a leap of faith and a loss of total control, in some ways, of the classroom. It requires scholarship, diligence, and willingness to learn, and it also takes an inordinate amount of time. Few people appreciate that.

But it also leads to better classroom work. I was invited to leave teaching with early retirement and a bonus. Innovation and that kind of thing was not amusing to the school system where I worked even if I had worked for the President — which seems to have made it worse.

I was not a prima donna or a diva either. I simply love teaching.

By John Adsit
Editor, Curriculum & Instruction

[Note: This article is a response to Steve Eskow's 22 Oct. 2009 comment on John's "Teacher Skills Critical for Success in Online Classes." Steve Eskow: "When I was a college faculty person, I didn’t resist change, I fancied myself a change agent. I did, however, resist change suggested by others, particularly other change agents who looked at my course materials, sighed, and proceeded to suggest changes." -js]

Steve, what you say is, in my experience, pretty universally true, and it is the ultimate dilemma in staff development. In my reply, I am going to include something from Bonnie’s last post as well.

I was involved with staff development for a number of years. It was my job to do exactly what you said you would not stand for—telling teachers how to do their work differently.

At first I labored under the direction of leaders who used perhaps the most misguided staff development policy of all time. Under the theory of models like the Annenberg Institute’s, the appointed educational leaders of the schools (principals and superintendents) tried to slip into the background and let teachers lead the change process. The idea was that if it appeared to come from within, change would be accepted by others. The opposite turned out to be true, and Annenberg’s own research showed that. Teachers who tried to act as change leaders were universally rejected by their peers, and they either folded their tents and retreated to the periphery of the school, transferred to another school, or dropped out of teaching altogether. I remember all too well the pain inflicted on me by those who openly bristled at my suggestions.

This was made even worse by a process we were required to follow in these attempts, a process that seemed absurd to me and which I fought unsuccessfully. We were supposed to smooth ruffled feathers from the start by telling them they were already doing a great job, but these new techniques, which would require them to change their ways so very much, would make them even better. I thought this would guarantee that they would not listen to us—if I am already doing a great job, why should I change? The National Staff Development Council later showed that I was absolutely right. Effective staff development will only work, it learned, if the people receiving the training could experience the cognitive dissonance that comes from realizing that what they are doing now is not working well.

Annenberg’s study showed that those bristling teachers were the primary reason (along with a complementary factor to be discussed later) for the failure of school reforms. In fact, one or two of those bristlers on a staff was enough to derail a reform embraced by nearly the entire rest of the staff. Bob Marzano, then of the Mid Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (MCREL) said in a conference I attended that he could not think of a worse way to implement reform, or a better way to destroy a dedicated teacher.

The Effective Schools research of people like Lazotte pointed toward a solution, one that is mentioned by Bonnie in her last post. The principal (or equivalent) must lead the reform effort. This principal must not impose a vision of reform on the population, but must instead use effective leadership skills (such as those described by DuFour, Fullan, and others) to bring the faculty to a shared vision in which all believe. The bristling resisters had to be dealt with effectively and eliminated from the staff, either by artful persuasion or by removal. I myself participated in a study of schools that were more effective than would be predicted by their the inherent characteristics of the student populations and saw that this was true in every school we analyzed. Believe it or not, every faculty member we interviewed knew by heart and believed in passionately the school’s mission statement, and it was a real mission statement, not the kind of meaningless cant we normally see.

Annenberg’s research showed the same thing. In 100% of the successful schools they surveyed, teachers reported that the primary (by far) reason for success was the way the educational leader was able to deal with teacher dissent and bring the faculty together. In 100% of the failed reform efforts, teachers reported that the primary reason (by far) for the failure was the way the educational leader was unable to deal with dissent and bring the faculty together.

So, a reformer such as myself has little chance of bringing reform to schools that lack such leadership, which is the vast majority.

Given that background, Steve, how do you suggest that change come to teachers who cling to outmoded ideas and bristle when told to do differently?

Steve Eskow, 23 Oct. 2009, 7:05 am:
A powerful and moving post, John.

All I have to contribute now are some early and unformed thoughts as answers to the question with which you ended your message.

First: I think I would try to rid myself of the vocabulary of teacher resistance, e.g. “teachers who cling to outmoded ideas.” All of us–including people like you and me who cling to constructivism and who would insist it’s not outmoded–are bristlers and resisters when our favorite recipes are challenged, as you document so well.

Based on your account, perhaps we as consultants need to differentiate between “external change agents”–you and me–and “internal change agents”–principals, superintendents, university deans and presidents. Perhaps one commandment for us might be “Thou shalt not undertake to change teachers unless and until there is an internal change agent as advocate.”

And another truism: we may need to do a better job of analyzing the pieces and interconnections of the educational system we’re trying to change to locate the various sources of the resistance to change. Obvious examples: the academic setting: if the building has lecture halls, do they ask to be used, and are we about saying letting them stand empty? If there is a hierarchy of instructional roles, e.g., lecturers and section leaders, which elements of the hierarchy resist the change? Accrediting bodies? National disciplinary bodies which define “standards”? Budget? The teachers to whom we attribute the resistance are one element in an elaborate ecology of forces that create and maintain the status quo, and attributing all the resistance to the teachers alone is patently unfair.

Or maybe not, John.

A beginning, John.

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 22 Oct. 2009, 9:20 am:
What reformers do is to infuse ideas and lend support for the teacher change agents and involve the administration of the schools in meaningful ways. My help was at the highest level. At George Mason, Chris Dede was teaching and he brought a whole class to watch me work, but also invited me to the class to share ideas, frustrations, concerns and anything I wanted to share.

Frank Withrow and other leaders also were there.

Eventually we became a group for change with some funding. You are needed. One teacher can be moved, disposed of in a New York Minute.

John Adsit, 24 Oct. 2009, 9:05 AM:

Steve, I am not sure all of us are bristlers when it comes to change. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but the reason I ended up being a staff developer was my penchant for experimentation with change. When I encountered a new idea, I tried it out. If it worked, I went with it. The instructional processes I taught (with enthusiasm) when I was a staff developer were ones I had never used 5 years before.

A number of books have been published in the last decade that report on research on the effects of different strategies on student achievement. Bob Marzano, for one, has published several. I have read them and taken what I could from them. One of those strategies is the use of graphic organizers for instructional activities, which are apparently quite effective. I have personally always hated them. Hated them. When I read the results of the research, though, I shrugged my shoulders and made sure that strategy was a part of our required instructional design.

What makes teaching so different from other professions? Did doctors continue to use the iron lung after other strategies were shown to be more effective? Did attorneys continue to cite Plessy v. Ferguson after Brown v. Board of Education overturned it?

One of the things I used to hear frequently in protest of change was “What I am doing now is working.” Really? Are all your students learning at a high level? Is there no room for improvement?

A colleague of mine was a major advocate of the traditional lecture as the primary (perhaps only) instructional practice in his classroom. He was, in fact, a very vocal critic of the changes I advocated. One day one of his students openly said that the class was boring. He said, “It is my job to be boring, and it is your job to be bored. That’s how education works.” The fact that his students had the worst record in the history of AP exams (you can’t do any worse than having not a single student take the test during the years you teach the course because of the fear that they will fail) did not deter him from his unshakable belief in the quality of his practices.

I guess I don’t understand that attitude.

24 Oct. 2009, 5:08 AM: [Reply to Bonnie:] That is how it starts. The students taking a class from the likes of Chris Dede are a far different group from teachers at a mandatory inservice workshop.

As I said before, the key element in your experience is the administration, which must understand the reform and know how to lead that change effectively.

John Thompson, 24 Oct. 2009, 5:29 am:
“What I am doing now is working.” Yes, I hear that all the time. “Why change if I’m already successful?” is the refrain. As a response, I like to highlight Tiger Woods. After he won The Masters golf tournament by a record margin, everyone was singing his praises and how accomplished he was. However, he wasn’t satisfied so he retooled his swing, which was dangerous because sometimes golfers who do that never get back to their previous level let alone to a higher level. But Woods took the risk and was successful after nearly two years of work. His game went to another higher level. After a few years, he did the same. And he did it yet again when he was hurt and came back after a long layoff to recuperate. Here’s the acknowledged greatest golfer in the world and he’s not satisfied with his performance. So how is it that some teachers can smugly assert they are doing everything they can do in their teaching? Plateauing is not an option for Tiger Woods. It shouldn’t be for our teachers either.

Steve Eskow, 24 Oct. 2009, 6:09 am:
Hi John,

First a general comment, then some interlinear commenting.

The general comment is really a question: Is there a bit of bristling in your last message to me?

Steve, I am not sure all of us are bristlers when it comes to change. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but the reason I ended up being a staff developer was my penchant for experimentation with change.

My speculation was this, John, and I am increasingly convinced there is something to it: many teachers do not bristle at change: like you, they have a “penchant for experimentation with change.”

They bristle at change agents.

A number of books have been published in the last decade that report on research on the effects of different strategies on student achievement. Bob Marzano, for one, has published several. I have read them taken what I could from them. One of those strategies is the use of graphic organizers for instructional activities, which are apparently quite effective. I have personally always hated them. Hated them. When I read the results of the research, though, I shrugged my shoulders and made sure that strategy was a part of our required instructional design.

Might it be that in a hypervisual culure one of the overall tasks of the educational system ought to be to balance visuality by emphasizing the language skills–language sans graphics–that make discussion, dialog, and debate possible? Students may have to learn to be comfortable in discussions without Power Point. Like this one.

(You of course are noticing that I am starting to resist–perhaps even bristle a bit.)

What makes teaching so different from other professions? Did doctors continue to use the iron lung after other strategies were shown to be more effective? Did attorneys continue to cite Plessy v. Ferguson after Brown v. Board of Education overturned it?

Here, John, we reach a critical point in our discussion and in our relationship, and I don’t know how to handle it well–so I’ll probably botch it and evoke resistance rather than understanding and agreement.

I’ll deal now only with the matter of education and medicine, and leave the matter of education and the law for another time.

Proposition: education and medicine are profoundly different, and it is a grave error to confound and confuse them.

Education is, at best, a “human science,” not a “natural science,” or a “physical science.”

Dilthey and others distinguished between “understanding”–what is attempted in the “human sciences”–and “explanation”–what is attempted in the natural sciences.

The belief that “educational research” provides us with hard incontestable evidence, e.g., that the research on graphic illustration is as conclusive as the iron lung–is a fallacy.

If it was, John, there would be no more Sages on Stages, all teachers would be Guides by the Side, and Harvard would require Michael Sandel to stop lecturing to a thousand students and become a quiet Guide by the Side.

It probably won’t happen, John.

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 24 Oct. 2009, 7:09 am:

Well I have been lucky. In my lifetime I met an older woman who pushed me kicking and screaming into study of the out of doors, not just in the book. But she was the supervisor so who was I to say no. She was the change agent. At first I resented the birding, wildflower, and so on courses, but then as I got good, I really enjoyed them and became the summer camp director. No one would have predicted that. I arrived on the first visit in my Chanel suit and Gucchi sandals, and she handed me boots, a big coat, and a bucket. We hiked and she would share what various things were, and we did this over a set of seasons, with proper credit and with some great comforting things at the outdoor lodge.

Then there was the Nanosecond lady. Grace Hopper. I kept thinking she is so old and the men are being deferential to her. She must be really smart. I taught in the shadow of the NSF. How the administrators in the school system razzed us when we did the NSF project, SeeYou SeeMe. There was the most terrible write up and criticism, and so also with the NASA projects. You had to pull teeth to get the supplies and resources or buy them, so I learned to write grants. I forgot who taught me this. Some man, a physics teacher at the museum in Richmond, Virginia. He was a mentor, too, with an unconventional way of teaching physics, and I loved it.

My funniest story is about the professor who got upset about people using wireless in his classroom. It was in the newspaper. He ranted and raved and pulled out the wireless, to no avail. Those students were bored and were surfing the net duing class. If you work with the Supercomputing people and can see them on the grid, you know you have their attention when they stop looking at the computer for a while, but it doesn’t bother you because they can multitask.

There were also supervisors who wanted all of the science materials back in the closet by 4 PM, There were the people who took what I got with the grants and claimed it, so I learned to make my name the total grant recipient. I learned to do this after I won a Mac and the principal declared she was going to put it in the library (they sent it to my home, fortunately).

My latest mentor is Bob Panoff. See www.shodor.org — Interactivate. Well, I have a lot of learning to do. I have taken wonderfulworkshops in the computational sciences, and, you know, it’s the way in which people teach that gets your interest and attention. Programming? He says, “What is the story you want to tell?”

Anyway Chris Dede was wonderful. I fought with Seymour Papert who did not understand the restrictions in various schools, but it was a good fight. Got me to go to MIT to share the concerns.

[Steve Eskow:] Based on your account, perhaps we as consultants need to differentiate between “external change agents”–you and me–and “internal change agents”–principals, superintendents, university deans and presidents. Perhaps one commandment for us might be “Thou shalt not undertake to change teachers unless and until there is an internal change agent as advocate.”

And another truism: we may need to do a better job of analyzing the pieces and interconnections of the educational system we’re trying to change to locate the various sources of the resistance to change.

John Adsit, 24 Oct. 2009, 7:26 am:
Steve,

I am not bristling at you. I have heard similar comments so often I rarely associate them with an individual any more. Along those lines though, in my old age my memory for such details is failing me and I must ask a question. Did we have similar exchanges a decade or so ago on WWWEDU?

Faulty research has plagued education for years. I think the greatest harm of all came from the faulty research processes in the Coleman study, which has led several generations of teachers to assume falsely that it does not matter how you teach, for educational achievement is determined by what the student brings to the classroom, not what the individual teacher brings to the student. Subsequent research has shown that the opposite is true, but I doubt if more than a small percentage of teachers is aware of this.

When I speak of the comparison of teaching to medicine, I am speaking primarily of the attitude of the practitioner. Physicians generally assume that no matter how well the procedures or medicines they now use are working, something will eventually come along to improve things. They are thus always on the lookout for such improvements. Teachers use rationales such as the one you provide to deflect all suggestions for change and stay with what they have always done. John Goodlad showed years ago that teachers generally teach the way they themselves were primarily taught, regardless of the educational program they are supposed to be implementing.

Back in the 1970s I was introduced to the idea of group or collaborative learning. I tried it and pronounced it a total failure. Years later I attended a workshop that included that concept once more, but this time they showed how to do it, and they said that if you don’t do it right, it will be a total failure. I realized I had not indeed done it right, for the reasons they showed me. When I used the methods these change agents showed me, it worked wonderfully, and it became a mainstay of my educational technique from then on. The district even had a film crew come in to one of my classes so they could show how effective the process can be.

In the early 1980s, I had to teach writing to a remedial class. I used the best grammar based approach I knew how, and failed utterly to teach them how to write in complete sentences. I concluded they were not capable of writing in complete sentences. Years later a change agent suggested that the grammar-based approach I used was not the best, and when I taught a remedial writing class again, using a totally different approach, I achieved 100% success in getting students to write in complete sentences.

I used to think my instructional approach to teaching Oedipus Rex was my best lesson, once that I would be selected to be evaluated on if given the choice. I would teach it with total pride in a Harvard lecture hall if given the chance. But, just before I was about to teach it one year, change agents suggested a different approach to education, and I immediately thought of a way to do it with Oedipus Rex. The results were so dramatically better than anything I had ever done before that I was stunned. It was, in fact, that experience that propelled me to becoming a change agent.

So, if you embrace change but despise change agents, how is change to occur without them?

Harry Keller, 24 Oct. 2009, 7:51 am:

You [John Thompson] said, “It shouldn’t be for our teachers either.” Indeed, it shouldn’t be for anyone seeking to remain competitive in their activities. I (with some great help) created an excellent online science lab system. However, not a day goes by that I don’t think about how to improve it. My severe resource constraints require me to be more creative and selective about the changes I make, and I continue to make them.

I think that I have the best solution, and I know that without constant improvement, it won’t remain there. If my biased opinion is incorrect, I have even more reason to make it better.

Despite the above, I think that we all should consider the reasons behind teachers not choosing change. Sure, some teachers may just plateau just as those in any activity may do so. However, the entire system thwarts change. Teachers arrive at their first classrooms with visions of all of the good work they’ll be doing. They’d like to try this idea and that idea. Soon, they discover that they aren’t rewarded for good effort or even good results. They may even be punished for innovation. For some the work is its own reward. Some become discouraged and leave teaching. Some others hang on hoping for a better future. Too many get worn out trying to build great education on a foundation of sand and mark time until they retire with a nice pension.

Let’s not be too quick to blame those in the trenches for a system that only partially works. To extend the metaphor, consider the captains and generals, the politicians and citizens, and the environment in which the “battle” is waged. Our education system should be synergistic. Too often, it’s dysfunctional.

Steve Eskow, 24 Oct. 2009, 10:35 am:

Ah, John, how could I hate change agents? That would be selb has, self hate: I’ve been one of those things for a long time.And now I’m working in Africa, where very few teachers care about Marzano.

You may be willing to consider that your personal testimonials (or mine) of transformation are no more convincing to a skeptic than those of car salesman testifying to the quality of the machine he is selling. You’re selling change, and you tell stories of miraculous improvements. I’m sure they’re true, but given your motivation they will be discounted.

Or: you’re explaining why teachers who themselves are actively, even eagerly changing, balk when an outsider tries to sell them on the need for change, and sell them his particular nostrum.

The Coleman Report, with all that star power and all those data collections faulty? Of course it was faulty.It was also a powerful stimulus for an important rethinking of education in the United States.

Incidentally, is the Marzano research faulty? Might it be found faulty tomorrow? If so, what happens to all those teachers and all those courses that are going graphic?

John, it might be useful to consider that just as you’ve heard all the voices of resistance to change, many of the resisting teachers have heard an army of change agents, all with similar messages about sages on stage and guides by the side and constructivism and active learning and digital natives who are pictorial rather than print oriented.

Maybe we change agents have to stop the old sermons and find some new ways to get educators to think about where they are and where they aren’t and how they might get there.

And that new way might not be active learning or constructivism. Are you, am I, able to face the possibility that we may have to abandon our faith in constructivism? Change ourselves and our story?

John Adsit, 24 Oct. 2009, 12:44 PM:

The flaw in the Coleman methodology unfortunately meant that the stimulus it provided for rethinking education may have pushed it in a bad direction.. To summarize very quickly, the study looked at whole school performance and compared school to school, finding that the factors that determined student achievement lay with the student.

The Coleman study did not adequately compare teacher to teacher within a school. More recent studies, especially the Sanders study in Tennessee, have shown a tremendous difference in student achievement from one teacher to another within a school, and they have shown it is not just a good or bad year. Some teachers will have consistently poor or consistently excellent results year after year after year. More important is the overall impact on students. A series of poor or excellent teachers in elementary school can mean the difference between dropping out and going to college.

Today we realize that the most important factor in student success lies in the instructional decisions made by the teacher in the classroom. That is a pretty big shift in thinking, one that is still not embraced by the majority of teachers.

Harry Keller, 24 Oct. 2009, 1:00 pm:

It’s great that someone actually bothered to study what most people instinctively know. The teacher is the primary determinant of student achievement, all student differences being factored out.

[John Adsit:] Today we realize that the most important factor in student success lies in the instructional decisions made by the teacher in the classroom. That is a pretty big shift in thinking, one that is still not embraced by the majority of teachers.

Steve Eskow, 24 Oct. 2009, 6:00 pm:

Harry, John, all:

Might it be all of the above: the school and its setting and climate; the students and their backgrounds and their culture; the teachers and their methods?

In the great US universities,e.g. Harvard, the lecture is a common instructional mode, perhaps the most common instructional mode.

And Harvard spends much time selecting its students for success.

Do we really believe it’s the great teaching methods at Harvard that make for its excellence? That Harvard is great because its faculty practices Marzano’s 9 secrets of great teaching?

Don’t we “instinctively” know that at least some of Harvard’s success is due to the quality of its students rather than the quality of its faculty?

[Harry Keller:] It’s great that someone actually bothered to study what most people instinctively know. The teacher is the primary determinant of student achievement, all student differences being factored out.

[John Adsit:] Today we realize that the most important factor in student success lies in the instructional decisions made by the teacher in the classroom. That is a pretty big shift in thinking, one that is still not embraced by the majority of teachers.

Harry Keller, 24 Oct. 2009, 6:36 pm:
Precisely, Steve.

That’s why Harvard (and Princeton and MIT and Caltech) spends so much effort on student selection.

After all, the courses at these institutions aren’t exactly paragons of excellent teaching. I know. I went to Caltech. The only “good” part of the courses was that they were very challenging. They forced you to think and think hard. The homework was grueling. The tests were unforgiving.

The faculty of these institutions are great but not for their teaching prowess. Many even dislike teaching.

However, primary and secondary education are different animals than post-secondary teaching.

The teacher is the person in the trenches, where the rubber meets the road (to mix metaphors). If all other factors (environment, student capability, family support, etc.) are eliminated, then the teacher is the one who makes the difference. In other words, if you look at the same school with students randomly distributed among teachers in the same subject, you should expect large and significant differences between teachers because there’s no uniformity. Each teacher is allowed to have an individual approach to the same curriculum.

Also, there’s very little control. Without feedback, any system can meander anywhere.

I think I see most of the issues clearly. I don’t have any real solution for the big picture. I continue to work on a small part of the solution for science education and hope that I can make a difference. Science students should have ample opportunities frequently to do science as scientists do no matter what their school or income level or background. That’s my goal.

John Adsit, 25 Oct. 2009, 6:53 am:
Back when America first realized there was a section 504 of IDEA, and teachers were required to accommodate certain student needs in the classroom, I was asked to write an article describing some of the instructional strategies needed to work with students with specified learning needs. I was given a stack of research and recommendations from which to work. To my amazement, I saw that a handful of the same instructional strategies were suggested for the vast majority of these learning needs.

When I asked special education experts to explain this, they told me that all students learn better when those methods are used. The difference is that the “good” students have the self-motivation and personal skills to overcome weak teaching, but the rest of the student must have excellent instructional strategies to succeed.

One study in which I participated as a researcher yields more evidence of this. I was part of a team that looked at student performance within a school (compare student performance entering the school with student performance leaving the school) to see if we could identify the characteristics of schools in which students improved the most during their stay. We were to identify 10 such schools in a very large school district and compare their characteristics. We found a concentration of such schools in one attendance area. (By attendance area, I am referring to a group of elementary schools feeding into a smaller number of middle schools feeding into one high school.) Most of the elementary schools and both of the middle schools in this one area were really doing an excellent job with their students.

As you might guess, the high school, by the most common measures, was doing very well. It sent a very high percentage of its students to elite colleges, like Harvard. The teachers at that high school were very self-confident and proud of what they were accomplishing. But our study showed the opposite. The achievement of their seniors was lower than would be expected in comparison to the achievement of their freshmen. This school’s students were actually losing ground while in those classrooms. They had students of gold walking in their doors, and they had students of silver walking out.

Every one of the high achieving elementary and middle schools in that attendance area used what would be called innovative instructional methods. The high school was quite traditional (lecture) in its instructional approach.

Harvard admits only students who will thrive under any educational experience. The fact that it admits such students does not imply that its teaching is excellent. You also have no comparison. You do not know how these excellent students would perform if Harvard abandoned its lectures and went to different instructional methods. They may do even better with a different approach.

By the way, Harvard medical school dropped its traditional lecture format years ago in favor of a more experiential approach to education. They found that after three years of lecture, their medical students didn’t seem to know anything when they started internships. They switched to a program where students start interning immediately, with great results. I had to study this program’s philosophy as a part of my training.

Harry Keller, 25 Oct. 2009, 7:08 am:

[John Adsit:] Harvard admits only students who will thrive under any educational experience. The fact that it admits such students does not imply that its teaching is excellent. You also have no comparison. You do not know how these excellent students would perform if Harvard abandoned its lectures and went to different instructional methods. They may do even better with a different approach.

John has it exactly right. We don’t know. However, from a strictly statistical estimate, we can expect that some other instructional strategies will work better. The same is true for MIT, which nearly kills their students with huge workloads and class averages that frequently are in the 30s.

I’m not sure where such approaches originate. Is it Darwinian? Is it “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

I have met MIT grads who have had their self-esteem destroyed. They’re smart but unsure of themselves. That’s a horrible outcome. Other MIT grads are cocky and self-assured beyond reason. That outcome isn’t as bad as the first, in my opinion, but it’s still not rational.

I’m not sure which strategy is best, but I know that MIT could improve theirs.

I’m making the point, in addition to John’s, that even if students survive because they were chosen to be able to survive virtually any educational environment, they may not actually thrive.

John Thompson, 25 Oct. 2009, 8:48 am:
On the other hand…

You can kill with kindness and/or lowered expectations and/or accepting what you see as the inevitable.

Case in point…A number of years ago I taught a one-credit “intro to college” course for freshmen university students at highly respected and tough admissions public higher ed institution. In our conversations during the semester the students related how easy their last half of their senior year in high school was. Apparently their teachers had concluded that there was nothing more to be gained from their insisting that the students continue grinding right through the end of the year. So instead, the teachers had accepted the premise and implications of the supposed “senioritis” syndrome so these otherwise hard driving students had effectively been given much of their last year off. At least this is what the students (pretty much all the students in the class) had admitted. The striking thing was that they expressed resentment and regret for that happening. They would have preferred to continue running right through the finish line instead of ending the race prematurely. But without their teachers mandating such hard work, the students had slacked off and developed bad habits that there dogging them in college.

So to reference another “syndrome,” this seems like what I refer to as the Goldilocks Syndrome. I.e., too hard-too easy-just right, too much-not enough-just right, etc. Where to draw the line? Who gets to draw it?

John Adsit, 25 Oct. 2009, 10:08 am:

Killing with kindness and lowered expectations are not the alternative I am suggesting for poor instructional technique. There are other things you can do.

The extreme Harry describes comes when a teacher sets high standards, leaves the students alone, and then measures the results.

The alternative John describes is to lower the standards, leave the students alone, and measure the results.

I am suggesting something very different:

1. Set high Standards

2. Use strong teaching methods to ensure that students meet those standards

3. Measure the results.

Someday I will write a book about the conspiracy of students, parents, teachers, and administrators in high school, who all work together to make sure that standards stay low, but that is another story—and an extremely long one.

I was once asked to consult with a technical college of nearly the same stature as MIT. There writing program was nearly nonexistent. I wanted to use the instructional methods that I had instituted in a high school that in two years had gone from 20th place in the district writing assessments to 1st place, which was the primary reason I ended up in that role. When they heard what I wanted to do, they were horrified. It would mean too many students would succeed and earn high grades, even though we were maintaining high standards. They needed to make sure that enough students got Ds and Fs to make it appear that they weren’t involved in grade inflation. I pointed out that the grades would not be inflated—the students would have achieved and learned at levels of worthy of As and Bs, but they would have none of it. They needed to make sure that a decent percentage of their students failed so that they could maintain their reputation for toughness.

Setting high standards and then failing those who are not able to get there on your own does not make you a great teacher. Setting high standards and then using your skills to help students reach them makes you a great teacher.

Steve Eskow, 25 Oct. 2009, 12:24 pm:

John, I’m increasingly unsure of your point as you tell these interesting stories.I am tempted to tell personal stories that point in different directions, but I don’t think my stories would help us to agreement.

Do we agree that no single factor can account for educational success? That educational results are influenced by a) the background, motivation, and development of the student; b) the culture of the school: a culture supportive of learning rather than a culture hostile to learning; and c) the skill of the teacher in recognizing a) and b) and adopting a teaching approach responsive to them?

Or are you saying that a) and b) don’t matter, don’t influence outcomes, and that only the skill of the teacher makes the difference?

John Adsit, 25 Oct. 2009, 12:46 pm:
Of course all things count.

What I am saying is that recent research says that the instructional strategies employed by the teacher are the primary factor in education. The others all all factors, too, and sometimes the best teachers with the best strategies cannot overcome all the other factors.

In the past, the belief was that the personal factors associated with the student were so important that the instructional strategies employed by the teacher were insignificant. That belief is still prevalent among educators.

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 25 Oct. 2009, 6:37 pm:

I always get really upset when the issue of Harvard is raised. How many people get to go to Harvard? Their influence is everywhere, but what are the rest of us supposed to be , chopped liver? My mentor is at Harvard, Chris Dede, but he does not rest on his Harvard reputation, he is out there at FETC, ISTE and other places.

We common people who went to the places that Arnie Duncan talked about are people too,Some of us collect learning experiences that are just as valuable as Harvard’s methodology.I would like to hear from others what they think was valuable as a learning experience.

I would like to know if we only use a few universities too expensive for most of us, and theoretically the best, but an isolated experience as a learning initiative from what is teaching and leanring , and then I question.

If Harvard is all of that, why are we still having minority based institutions ? Minority serving institutions need help but as Arnie Duncan says they need more than that. If Harvard is so great isn’t part of their mission to improve education for the masses? What is their outreach to other groups.

Or do we have an elite organization that pats itself on the back creates initiatives and thumbs away the rest of the teaching instititions?

Regarding students, it is easy to talk and blame the teacher for the lack of student achievement when there are other variables. The perception from the top of what is right. We teach mind numbing math that gets terrible results.

We have this ongoing fight in reading about phonics and other types of reading such as reading as an experiential type of learning. A little girl asked me once why do we have so many ways of teaching phonics from book to book.

For about eight years , science has been neglected in favor of what was tested, in 8 of the states in which I work 20 minutes a week ( probably more time given to announcements and bathroom.. and we want to be first in the world?

I have taught urban, rich, DODDS, ghetto, inner city not ghetto, rural and distant and each population has its needs. Working in inner city DC, I worried more about children’s food, health and living conditions, often finding them sleeping beneath my car , or at my doorstop. There was little in the way of resources in the ghetto schools. More in DODD schools just a really interesting ELL problem, which was over come.

I think the theorists need to put their teaching ideas in practice to show us what works everywhere. There is no universal way to teach that fits all situations. You have to look at the variables of the situation..

John Adsit, 26 Oct. 2009, 5:46 am:
Steve,

I agree with the first part of the message, and I feel it is too bad that you have experienced the last part:

And the notion promoted by some change agents that certain instructional techniques are always and uniformly beneficial are the problem, e.g. the belief that multimediated instruction is always preferable to monomediated instruction, or the insistence that group collaborative instruction is always superior to individualized instruction.

No one I know teaches that. We instead teach that the skilled teacher has a large repertoire of instructional strategies ready to be used. That teacher uses whatever is appropriate to the content, the situation, and the student.

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 26 Oct. 2009, 5:45 am:
See Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, by Jane Margolis

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 26 Oct. 2009, 6:00 am:
I hear so much talk about the poor teacher. What are the earmarks for such. Teaching is like slavery, by permission, they had permission to service the crops, they did not design the land, create the soil, the weather/climate and or manage the variables of insects, disease or the illnesses that rankled the enslaved and majority population , still they were supposed to pick their bale of cotton. Regardess… Teachers have very limited permission and the more control a school system has the less innovation and creativity there is.

John Adsit, 26 Oct. 200i, 6:07 am:
[Re Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, by Jane Margolis] This is a good example of the conspiracy to lower standards I suggested earlier.

There is an assumption that some students are not capable of swimming in the deep end, so they are steered toward lover level classes. The students and parents are generally happy with that, because they have come to believe the same thing and try to avoid the extra work that they believe will not lead to anything positive anyway.

Administrators are happy, too, for they are pressured to improve the percentage of students who graduate. Graduation requires the completion of a certain number of courses, not a certain standard of quality. The schools are thus well served by an academic program that provides enough units to get students graduated. Learning would be a nice actual side benefit, but it is not the goal.

Everyone is working together to make sure students don’t learn.

That is only one segment of the greater conspiracy.

Harry Keller, 26 Oct. 2009, 6:31 am:
As a scientist and not an education researcher, I have to wonder what all of the talk about recent research in education means in light of this comment. It would seem that educators attempt to follow research in choosing what to do in the classroom. The Department of Education, in its new “Investing in Innovation Fund,” has emphasized techniques that have the support of studies.

If each situation requires different approaches, then the research either cannot be universally applied or else must be imperfect in the first place. I know that difficulties should not prevent us from trying. Still, it would seem to be a cautionary note with regard to applying research results blindly.

[John Adsit:] No one I know teaches that. We instead teach that the skilled teacher has a large repertoire of instructional strategies ready to be used. That teacher uses whatever is appropriate to the content, the situation, and the student.

John Adsit, 26 Oct. 2009, 7:45 am:
Different instructional approaches are needed for a variety of reasons. Here are a couple:

1. Different subjects have different content goals. Some are heavily weighted toward skill and performance, and others have a greater emphasis on content knowledge.
2. Different students learn in different ways. What works for student A is less effective for student B.
3. Varying approaches keeps students interested and engaged.
4. Even within a content area, learning goals are complex and variation in approaches leads to more complete learning.
5. Different approaches take differing amounts of time, and teachers have to work with an eye to the calendar. A true constructive project takes a lot of time, and the instructor frequently cannot do all learning that way and get the job done. In planning a unit, the instructor will decide that some degree of lecture is needed for some aspects of the learning, some level of practice is needed, and a project might complete the learning process.