Posted on November 5, 2011 by in Gifted

Gifted Education Is Not a Wall Street Bailout

No Bailout (by Joe Newman)“Unfair.”

That is the word that I have often heard used to describe the 2008 bailout of Wall Street finan­cial firms. The think­ing of detrac­tors is that these are com­pa­nies which already have amassed obscene amounts of prof­its, and have exec­u­tives who get paid more in a day than the aver­age worker earns in a year. And then they have the nerve to run to the gov­ern­ment for free cash when some of their high risk gam­bles turn out to be—surprise—unwise and they are in dan­ger of mak­ing a smaller profit than they hoped.

Sup­port­ers of the bailout, of course, argue that it was a cri­sis sit­u­a­tion, and that they were “too big to fail.” They say the con­se­quences of allow­ing all of those firms to fail would have been cat­a­strophic, rip­pling down to thou­sands of small busi­nesses that depended on the big ones for financ­ing and insur­ance, poten­tially caus­ing the whole econ­omy to collapse.

I’m not here to argue either side of this par­tic­u­lar debate, but it strikes me that the tone is not far removed from the con­ver­sa­tions I hear around gifted education.

While no one argues that we shouldn’t edu­cate gifted students—that would be an awfully rad­i­cal posi­tion to take—I do hear peo­ple argue that we should not be doing any­thing “spe­cial” just for gifted stu­dents. After all, they already have had so much handed to them, they are already priv­i­leged to be smart, and now we are going to give them even more? It’s the bailout all over again.

The counter to this is usu­ally some­thing along the lines of argu­ing that gifted stu­dents are the future lead­ers and inven­tors and job-​​creators, so to do any­thing short of max­i­miz­ing their poten­tial is to short­change our entire soci­ety. In short, they say, gifted kids are too big to fail.

This is the wrong argu­ment, how­ever. For one thing, under­ly­ing the debate is the assump­tion that gifted stu­dents are supe­rior to other chil­dren in some way, which log­i­cally implies that other chil­dren are infe­rior. The argu­ment that gifted stu­dents are des­tined for great­ness pre­sumes that such great­ness will elude all other chil­dren. I do not believe this.

What I do believe is that dif­fer­ent peo­ple learn dif­fer­ently. Some peo­ple have a capac­ity for learn­ing more and faster than oth­ers. This is not an elit­ist thing. It is sim­ply a recog­ni­tion of the vari­a­tions in human beings. Just as some peo­ple have a nat­ural capac­ity for sports or music, oth­ers have a tal­ent for math or lan­guage or under­stand­ing human relationships.

These capac­i­ties do not develop on their own. Pey­ton Man­ning has an unde­ni­able tal­ent for foot­ball, but he did not reach the high­est lev­els of the sport by coast­ing on that tal­ent. He works very hard to hone his skills, to iden­tify his rel­a­tive weak­nesses and improve them, and to keep his nat­ural abil­i­ties at the absolute peak of performance.

Edu­ca­tion is not a zero-​​sum game. Pro­vid­ing some­thing to one group of stu­dents which helps them to grow does not some­how deny it to another group, unless you explic­itly build it that way. Rec­og­niz­ing high abil­ity and nur­tur­ing it does not mean that we ignore the needs of stu­dents who strug­gle to learn.
Instead of a bailout metaphor, then, I sug­gest that gifted edu­ca­tion is more like infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment. The growth of our country’s econ­omy is depen­dent on hav­ing suf­fi­cient infra­struc­ture to allow it to func­tion. Roads, bridges, util­i­ties, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems aren’t sexy, but they allow us access to peo­ple, resources, and ideas out­side of our imme­di­ate neighborhood.

Every child has the poten­tial to become an adult with some­thing valu­able to con­tribute to our world. Each one’s con­tri­bu­tion will be dif­fer­ent, how­ever. I do not pro­pose we should begin try­ing to iden­tify in sec­ond or third grade what a child’s des­tiny is; how­ever, we should begin try­ing to iden­tify what a child’s capac­i­ties are and to find out how they learn best. Is that not what school is about any­way? And if a child learns more effi­ciently, then pro­vid­ing that child with the right match of con­tent and instruc­tion to allow them to develop fully is not giv­ing a hand­out to a rich CEO, it is rec­og­niz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties in an untapped region and build­ing the infra­struc­ture there to allow it to fully develop.

And here is the really excit­ing part about it. If we shift our focus from “what’s best for all” to “what’s best for each,” then it will ben­e­fit not only gifted stu­dents, but every stu­dent, and the out­come can only be good.

Posted on October 31, 2011 by in Storytelling

You Want Me to Write a WHAT?

A novel.

Yep, you heard me, I want you to write a novel. Don’t look behind you, I mean you.

And not just that, I want you to write it in a month.

I know, you have all kinds of excuses why you can’t pos­si­bly. So do I. And all of them are legit­i­mate and seri­ous. (Well, OK, most of them.)

Which is why I’m going to do some­thing utterly ridicu­lous: I’m going to take my own advice. I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in this year’s NaNoW­riMo, oth­er­wise known as National Novel Writ­ing Month. The chal­lenge is to write at least 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.

Can’t be done, you say? Well, in its first year, 21 peo­ple gave it a try, and 6 of them won. “Win­ning” NaNoW­riMo has noth­ing to do with writ­ing a bet­ter novel than Char­lie Sheen. It’s sim­ply the accom­plish­ment of reach­ing the word-​​count goal, and while your text has to be val­i­dated at the project web­site in order for you to be an offi­cial win­ner, the whole thing is essen­tially on the honor sys­tem. If you copy 50,000 words from Wikipedia and paste it into the val­ida­tor, no one will know you cheated but you.

But that’s kind of the point. This isn’t about writ­ing the great­est novel ever. It’s not even about get­ting pub­lished (though some NaNoW­riMo nov­els do). It’s sim­ply about the accom­plish­ment. And last year, over 200,000 peo­ple from around the world par­tic­i­pated in the event, with 37,500 reach­ing the goal.

So why am I doing this? And why do I think you should too? The most impor­tant rea­son is, “Just because.” But I do have a cou­ple others.

  1. Writ­ing is learn­ing. When I write, I learn about the topic I’m writ­ing, and I learn about myself. Things come out in my words that I had no idea were inside me. I am often amazed when I go back to some­thing I wrote a long time ago. Many times I don’t even rec­og­nize the lan­guage or vocabulary.
  2. Writ­ing is liv­ing. Life, I believe, is ulti­mately all about rela­tion­ships. And rela­tion­ships are built on com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I’m lim­ited in the num­ber of peo­ple with whom I can com­mu­ni­cate verbally—writing extends my reach and my vision to con­nect me with peo­ple who I would oth­er­wise never know about.

So why write a novel? Can’t I just start with a short story? Or maybe a sen­tence fragment?

I can’t answer that ques­tion for you. I do know for me, part of it is so I can say I did it. Part of it is that I real­ized that unless I just sit down and do it, it will never get done. And the absurdly ridicu­lous dead­line is going to make me pour out the words and not worry about how good it is. Which, by the way, is one heck of a good rea­son you ought to not only do this your­self, but encour­age your stu­dents to do it. But that’s another blog post.

For now, I’m count­ing down to mid­night, when I can start writ­ing, and get a cou­ple hun­dred words under my belt and finally get this story out of my head and onto the computer.

I hope you’ll join me. If you do, add me as a writ­ing buddy. And I’ll see you at the fin­ish line on Novem­ber 30.

Posted on October 9, 2011 by in Leadership, Policy

Teaching by NFL Rules: A Response to Fran Tarkenton

This past Mon­day, the Wall Street Jour­nal posted an opin­ion piece by Fran Tarken­ton in which he pos­tu­lated what the NFL might be like if it had to play by what he called “teach­ers’ rules.” Tarken­ton says:

Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not tal­ent. The same scale is used for every player, no mat­ter whether he’s an All-​​Pro quar­ter­back or the last man on the ros­ter. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only dif­fer­ence between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third sea­son, he can never be cut from the ros­ter until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Tarkenton’s argu­ment is not par­tic­u­larly new—the idea of per­for­mance or merit pay for teach­ers has been around for at least 60 years—but it is increas­ingly pop­u­lar with the pub­lic. No Child Left Behind cre­ated a sys­tem for rat­ing and rank­ing schools and dis­tricts, and recently there has been a move in a few cities like Los Ange­les and New York to extend that sys­tem to indi­vid­ual teach­ers. Never mind that the scores are flawed at best; to those who believe intu­itively that link­ing teacher pay to teacher per­for­mance can only be a good thing, Tarkenton’s essay is like an inter­cep­tion that was returned 99 yards for the game-​​winning touchdown.

Behind his argu­ments, how­ever, are flawed assump­tions and metaphors twisted to fit them. Let’s dis­sect his argu­ments and con­sider the real dif­fer­ences between the world of edu­ca­tion and Tarkenton’s fan­tasy football.

  1. Salary sched­ules. Tarken­ton derides a “union-​​created sys­tem [which] pro­vides no incen­tive for bet­ter per­for­mance,” pre­fer­ring a purely performance-​​based sys­tem of pay. But the NFL itself has a salary sched­ule, bar­gained col­lec­tively with the NFLPA, which, guess what, dic­tates the min­i­mum salary a player must earn based on their years of per­for­mance. A rookie in 2011 will earn no less than $375,000, while after ten years, a player at the top of the scale earns a min­i­mum of $910,000. Repeat: those are minimums.
  2. Fund­ing. In 2009, all 32 NFL teams paid a com­bined $3.4 bil­lion for player salaries. Rev­enues from sta­dium ticket sales for those teams were slightly over $7 bil­lion for 1,700 play­ers (53 per team). In con­trast, accord­ing to the US Cen­sus Bureau, in 2009 there were more than 15,000 pub­lic school dis­tricts in the US, with almost $591 bil­lion in rev­enue and $209 bil­lion spent on 4.3 mil­lion teacher salaries. Thus, the edu­ca­tion sys­tem has 469 times as many employ­ers as the NFL but only 84 times the rev­enue pay­ing 61 times the salaries for 2,500 times the employees.
  3. Sup­ply and Demand. Accord­ing to the NCAA, there are an esti­mated 317,000 high school seniors play­ing foot­ball in a given year. Of those, only 250 (or less than a tenth of a per­cent) will get drafted into the NFL. When you get rid of a “bad” foot­ball player, there is a long line of poten­tial replace­ments ready to fill the slot. Teach­ing is not nearly as com­pet­i­tive: there are places in every state where teach­ers are so in demand that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment offers bonuses to peo­ple will­ing to teach there. Many posi­tions remain unfilled, or are filled by under­qual­i­fied staff.
  4. Results. In the NFL, eval­u­at­ing qual­ity is rel­a­tively straight­for­ward. Teams with good play­ers win, and teams with bad play­ers lose. End of story. The same is actu­ally roughly true in edu­ca­tion: bet­ter learn­ing hap­pens where there are bet­ter teach­ers. But the anal­ogy falls apart when you con­sider that the NFL is explic­itly designed to ele­vate one “best” team every year at the expense of the other 31. But education’s goal is dif­fer­ent: we want every child in every class­room to learn and meet a min­i­mum stan­dard of accept­able achieve­ment. We won’t tol­er­ate a com­pet­i­tive sys­tem where some kids win and most kids lose.
  5. Coach­ing. Tarken­ton says that in the NFL, as in “every other pro­fes­sion: if you’re good, you get rewarded, and if you’re not, then you look for other work.” If only it were really true: every Sun­day there are thou­sands of arm­chair quar­ter­backs who would be very quick to give their opin­ions about which play­ers are the bums that should be rushed out the door. But the real­ity is that in the NFL, if you’re not good, you are coached, you get inten­sive train­ing and assis­tance and the oppor­tu­nity to work your butt off to get bet­ter. And you get repeated oppor­tu­ni­ties over mul­ti­ple attempts to prove your value to the team before you are cut.
  6. Causal­ity vs. Cor­re­la­tion. In the NFL, team scores are a direct result of the per­for­mance of the play­ers on the field. Bet­ter play­ers pro­duce con­sis­tently bet­ter per­for­mances which result in con­sis­tently more wins. In edu­ca­tion, although the teacher’s skills affect stu­dent learn­ing, it is an indi­rect and fuzzy rela­tion­ship. There are so many other fac­tors involved that to load all of the respon­si­bil­ity and all of the con­se­quences of the out­come onto one per­son is unrea­son­able and unfair. Cor­re­la­tion? Yes. Causal? Not so much.
  7. Con­tin­u­ous Improve­ment. There is an assump­tion in edu­ca­tion that schools and teach­ers will get bet­ter and bet­ter every year with no dips, no slumps, no gaps, and no plateaus. This isn’t real­is­tic, at least not where humans are involved. Even the best NFL play­ers can have a game or two where things don’t go well. Spec­tac­u­lar teams can even crash and burn–just look at this year’s Philadel­phia Eagles, who were widely believed to have assem­bled some of the nation’s best tal­ent, and started their sea­son 1–3.

Let’s imag­ine what the NFL would really be like if it played by cur­rent edu­ca­tion rules. Every town in the US would be required to have a pro­fes­sional foot­ball team. Every team would get nine months of prac­tice lead­ing up to one and only one game. Every team in the league would be expected to win that game every year, and in fact would have to increase its score year after year, or be labeled a “fail­ing team.” Every res­i­dent of the town would be required to attend every game, whether they wanted to or not, and the town would hold a ref­er­en­dum to deter­mine ticket prices.

Every player on that team would be expected to score a min­i­mum num­ber of points dur­ing the game or be labeled a fail­ing player. Play­ers who whined that they didn’t have the sup­port of their team­mates, or who had a poor coach, or played for a team that didn’t have money for foot­balls, would be told that those were just excuses, and that if they really were good play­ers they could over­come those chal­lenges and win anyway.

On the other hand, if Tarkenton’s fan­tasy of teach­ing like foot­ball really did come true, then rookie teach­ers would make $375K. Maybe he’s onto some­thing after all.

Posted on October 9, 2011 by in Announcements

Quisitivity Has Moved

As part of a larger project to update and con­sol­i­date my pro­fes­sional pres­ence online, I have moved my blog, Quis­i­tiv­ity, to this new loca­tion. You should be able to find all of the old con­tent in essen­tially the same places, with added con­tent from my port­fo­lio and per­sonal blogs. Enjoy!

Posted on May 23, 2011 by in Learning, Networking

Edcamp: A Professional Development Amuse Bouche

I spent this past Sat­ur­day at edcamp Philly. Edcamp is an uncon­fer­ence: a gath­er­ing of pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tors that is delib­er­ately struc­tured dif­fer­ently than your typ­i­cal pro­fes­sional con­fer­ence. Instead of a set sched­ule of pre­sen­ters and ven­dors, pre­de­fined and pre­s­e­lected by a com­mit­tee, the atten­dees cre­ate the sched­ule on the fly by propos­ing their own sessions.

The top­ics at this year’s edcamp Philly ranged from “Mod­els of 1:1 Com­put­ing in the Age of Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics” to what was billed as the last-​​ever “Things That Suck” by Dan Calla­han (sorry, Dan, you may never get away from the con­nec­tion). The tone of the con­fer­ence and the ses­sions is almost self-​​consciously casual and irrev­er­ent, cul­mi­nat­ing in a “Smack­down” where par­tic­i­pants came to the podium and shared in rapid-​​fire suc­ces­sion a web site or app they thought was par­tic­u­larly use­ful, pow­er­ful, or sim­ply cool.

This is my third uncon­fer­ence (fifth if you count Educon, which has a sim­i­lar feel, but is more struc­tured). The first time I attended one, I left feel­ing like my head was going to explode from the sheer vol­ume of ideas that had been gen­er­ated over the week­end. Since then, I have had sim­i­larly pow­er­ful responses and believe there is some­thing to this that could be trans­lated into more tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment are­nas. That was, in fact, one of the ses­sions I attended on Sat­ur­day, and there was some pow­er­ful con­ver­sa­tion around the idea of dis­tricts adopt­ing an edcamp-​​like model for some of their inter­nal training.

But I can’t help but think that there ought to be more to this, also. I’m won­der­ing of some of the energy is sim­ply from the new-​​ness of doing PD dif­fer­ently. There was a con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter last night (in which I did not par­tic­i­pate) prompted by a very fair ques­tion by Bud Hunt:

“Have been check­ing in on #edcamp tweets off & on today. Still wait­ing for the use­ful bits. What’d I miss? Worth your time to go to #edcamp? I see plenty of state­ments regard­ing the awe­some­ness of #edcamp, and plenty of smart peo­ple involved, but no steak to match the sizzle.”

I have to agree with him: I seem to be miss­ing the steak, and I’ve been won­der­ing why. It got me think­ing about why edcamp still feels pow­er­ful and impor­tant to me, even though I walk away from many ses­sions feel­ing as though noth­ing of sub­stance actu­ally took place. On reflec­tion (which isn’t done yet, by the way), I’ve come up with some rea­sons that edcamp is still worth the time:

  1. It’s about the rela­tion­ships. The great­est thing I have received from each of the uncon­fer­ences I’ve attended is con­nec­tions with other edu­ca­tors. I have made some very good friends through the con­ver­sa­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion that has devel­oped from each edcamp I have attended. I have found peo­ple who have sim­i­lar beliefs and inter­ests, and in many cases we have extended our work beyond that day.
  2. My bat­ter­ies get recharged. Each and every time I attend one of these, I am sud­denly immersed in a deep pool of peo­ple who care deeply about edu­ca­tion. In my every­day work envi­ron­ment, I am extremely for­tu­nate to work with sev­eral oth­ers who are as pas­sion­ate about edu­ca­tion as I am, but even so, it is a pow­er­ful thing to walk into a room where there are over a hun­dred peo­ple who have vol­un­tar­ily cho­sen to use their week­end talk­ing about work. It is next to impos­si­ble to walk away from that envi­ron­ment with­out feel­ing ener­gized and renewed.
  3. My map gets big­ger. It never fails that in every ses­sion I attend at an edcamp, I am exposed to a thought, idea, tool, resource, or con­nec­tion that I wasn’t aware of or hadn’t con­sid­ered before. I find out that some­one has already been doing some­thing that I was con­sid­er­ing, and now I have a place to go for advice. I learn about a tool that will solve a prob­lem I’ve been hav­ing, or I add a resource to my col­lec­tion and now have more ways to approach something.

Edcamp ses­sions never bring me to the point of mas­tery of a topic, and often we are no closer to a solu­tion to the prob­lems fac­ing edu­ca­tion than we were at the begin­ning. There are no deliv­er­ables at the end, there isn’t often a great deal of mea­sur­able growth or action.

I’m begin­ning to real­ize, though, that edcamp and sim­i­lar gath­er­ings can’t and won’t be the entire meal. It is more like an amuse-​​bouche: a tan­ta­liz­ing, bite-​​sized taste, designed to pre­pare the mouth for the later courses, to excite the taste buds and waken the senses to embrace the entire expe­ri­ence of the meal to come.

Should more sub­stance, more meat, be brought into the mix? Should the orga­niz­ers of edcamps think about how to begin grow­ing the model out of its infancy into a more sophis­ti­cated thing? Should there be out­comes and evi­dence of real learn­ing at the end of the day?

Per­haps. I leave it for another day to pon­der how that might hap­pen. But for now, I’m con­tent know­ing that edcamp has a very valu­able and worth­while place in inspir­ing me to keep work­ing hard at mak­ing things bet­ter for kids, not only in my own dis­trict, but as part of the larger edu­ca­tion community.

How about you? What other rea­sons is this kind of uncon­fer­ence still worth­while, even if the meat isn’t there yet?

Posted on May 2, 2011 by in Learning, Policy, Uncategorized

The Solution to Climate Change: When In Doubt, Choose C.

Imag­ine pick­ing up the news­pa­per and see­ing this story:

A 9.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake and sub­se­quent tsunami struck Japan today, caus­ing wide­spread destruc­tion. Dur­ing a news con­fer­ence, the Prime Min­is­ter said, “We have con­sid­ered all of the pos­si­ble solu­tions to this prob­lem, elim­i­nated the dis­trac­tor and one other obvi­ous wrong answer, and then guessed between the two that remained. We chose C.”


Obvi­ously ridicu­lous (and not because news­pa­pers are myth­i­cal crea­tures). Yet this is what we are set­ting our chil­dren up to expect. Because the entire world of school now revolves around the prepa­ra­tion for, and the after­math of, high-​​stakes annual tests, stu­dents now believe that all prob­lems worth solv­ing have pre-​​defined “right” answers. Even worse, they believe that “prob­lem solv­ing” means being able to suc­cess­fully choose (or if all else fails, guess) what that right answer might be.

Let’s stay in this alter­nate uni­verse for a lit­tle while and see how our future cit­i­zens might tackle some typ­i­cal real world problems:

1. You are the senior man­ager of a nuclear power plant that has been dam­aged in an earth­quake. Radi­a­tion is leak­ing, and the core tem­per­a­ture is ris­ing, rapidly approach­ing melt down. Do you:

a) Draft a press release min­i­miz­ing the threat to the com­mu­nity?
b) File a law suit against the engi­neer­ing firm that built the plant?
c) Turn the air con­di­tion­ers on high?
d) Panic and cry?

2. You are the Chair­man of the Fed­eral Reserve and you just dis­cov­ered that sev­eral of the country’s largest banks are in dan­ger of fail­ing cat­a­stroph­i­cally because of poor invest­ments and ques­tion­able account­ing prac­tices. Do you:

a) Blame it on the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion?
b) Tell the Trea­sury Depart­ment to print up a whole bunch of new money to help the banks catch up?
c) Lower inter­est rates?
d) Panic and cry?

You get the idea. Real world prob­lems don’t have a finite set of solu­tions from which we sim­ply have to pick the best. Nat­ural dis­as­ters, the econ­omy, cli­mate change, even our per­sonal rela­tion­ships are com­pli­cated and messy. Yet I already see in my own chil­dren a mind­set where if they don’t know the obvi­ous “right” answer to a prob­lem, they wait for some­one to give it to them—or at least to give them the pos­si­ble options they can choose from.

You are likely famil­iar with the Chi­nese proverb about fish­ing. My wife and two of my sons went fish­ing last week while on vaca­tion in Florida. In the course of about three hours, I caught one trout (on my first cast, no less), and my son caught a small cat­fish we had to throw back. There were sev­eral times that all of us were get­ting tired and frus­trated and I just wanted to be able to jump into the water and hook some­thing onto their lines for them.

Many of our class­rooms can look like this. Teach­ing some­one how to fish, or how to solve math prob­lems, or how to read, can be com­pli­cated, frus­trat­ing, and tire­some. It is tempt­ing to just show them short­cuts, and often we do.

The prep-​​and-​​test cycle can lead this way as well. As Diana Laufen­berg said to me yes­ter­day on Twitter,

@geraldaungst we’ve got to get over this obses­sion that there is a bucket of info our stu­dents should be car­ry­ing around.Sun May 01 18:34:08 via webDiana Laufen­berg
dlaufenberg

(Thanks to Diana for also sug­gest­ing the idea that led to the title of this post.)

There is an expec­ta­tion, rein­forced by years of NCLB, that in edu­ca­tion we can see steady, con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, and that the sim­ple path to this improve­ment is bet­ter teach­ing by bet­ter teach­ers. It’s like dri­ving a school bus: if we get a dri­ver who is more effec­tive, the bus will get to its des­ti­na­tion more effi­ciently and the pas­sen­gers on that bus will get fur­ther along the route.

The real­ity is much more com­plex and much more sub­tle. Teach­ers aren’t the bus dri­vers. Stu­dents are. And not only are they not in the same place on the route, they’re not all even on the route. In fact, they’re not all dri­ving buses. Some have cars, some are on bikes, some are walk­ing or even sit­ting in canoes. When a teacher gets involved in the process, it’s not a sim­ple mat­ter of turn­ing the steer­ing wheel, giv­ing it gas, or apply­ing the brake. We are more like guides who are explain­ing the map. We don’t have the lux­ury of see­ing imme­di­ate results of our instruc­tion, and in fact by the time results start to appear, we have likely given a great deal of addi­tional instruc­tion in the meantime.

I’ve used this school bus metaphor before, and will likely expand on it more in the future. The point here is that the real­ity of teach­ing doesn’t align with the expec­ta­tion of imme­di­ate and pos­i­tive improve­ment. Just like I got frus­trated wait­ing to see results of our attempt at fish­ing last week and wanted to take short­cuts, teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors look for faster, more straight­for­ward ways of get­ting the results that are demanded. So we also take short­cuts, train­ing kids to take tests more effec­tively and more effi­ciently, fill­ing their non-​​existent buck­ets with globs of infor­ma­tion just wait­ing to be spewed out onto their test book­lets like graphite measles. We sac­ri­fice learn­ing for per­for­mance, under­stand­ing for achieve­ment, and inno­va­tion for indoctrination.

Short­cuts can only get short term results, and only by the tightly lim­ited def­i­n­i­tion of “results” that is in vogue today: a test-​​score graph with a pos­i­tive slope. Real world results mean solv­ing real prob­lems; messy, com­pli­cated, con­fus­ing prob­lems where there might very well be no real solu­tion. It doesn’t mean going by the book, it means writ­ing an entirely new one. Results are about cre­at­ing new things that never existed before, not about select­ing the least inad­e­quate of some­one else’s mediocre options.

When I was in school, one of the tricks of the multiple-​​choice game that I was taught was, “When in doubt, choose C.” I sug­gest that we need a new answer:

E. None of the above.

Post­script: This post was writ­ten and sched­uled before the events of last evening. Just one more exam­ple of an immensely com­plex prob­lem with no easy or obvi­ous solu­tions. I’m glad we have problem-​​solvers work­ing on this and not answer-​​selecters.

Posted on May 1, 2011 by in Gifted, Leadership

Gifted Education in the 21st Century

Damian Bariexca (@damian613) brings us the sev­enth in what is now an ongo­ing series of posts on the future of gifted edu­ca­tion. Damian brings a unique per­spec­tive to this con­ver­sa­tion from his expe­ri­ence as both a school psy­chol­o­gist and high school Eng­lish teacher in New Jer­sey. This arti­cle is cross-​​posted at Damian’s blog, Apace of Change.

I’m a school psy­chol­o­gist, so my pro­fes­sional life is a mine­field of labels and acronyms — FAPE, IEP, SLD, OHI, IDEA, PLAAPF, ICS, FBA, “gen ed >80%”, “gen ed 40%-80%”, “gifted”, “learn­ing dis­abled”, etc. While labels like these are the real­ity for now, I have a vision of edu­ca­tion in the 21st cen­tury that reduces or pos­si­bly even elim­i­nates the need for these labels. Although my pro­fes­sional focus is on stu­dents with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties (gift­ed­ness is not a spe­cial ed clas­si­fi­ca­tion in NJ), I believe that LD and gift­ed­ness fall under the same umbrella in that they rep­re­sent atyp­i­cal learn­ing styles and abil­i­ties, and must both be accom­mo­dated accordingly.

My issue with labels stems, in large part, from my own child­hood, when I was iden­ti­fied as a “gifted” child in grade 3. I remained in my district’s pull-​​out “Gifted & Tal­ented” pro­gram through grade 8, when the pro­gram ended. While I did enjoy get­ting to leave class to work on more chal­leng­ing projects, there were the con­stant com­ments of “there goes the nerd herd”, etc., when­ever my class­mates and I would leave. A friend of mine was rec­om­mended to the G&T pro­gram in 6th grade but declined; when I asked him why, he said, “Because every­one will think I’m a nerd like you guys!” At age 11, that cut me to the quick, and it’s awfully telling that I can remem­ber that con­ver­sa­tion and his response ver­ba­tim over two decades after the fact.

From early on, my “gift­ed­ness”* was a double-​​edged sword: it was seen as desir­able in terms of school (was it a com­pe­ti­tion that I was “win­ning”?), but socially it became an alba­tross around my neck. I’ll spare you the tor­tured self-​​analysis, but suf­fice to say I’ve thought a lot about it over the years and have drawn some pretty solid con­clu­sions that are prob­a­bly bet­ter dis­cussed over some beers than in a blog post. While I don’t think this is the only issue, con­sider, for instance, the phys­i­cal removal from the gen­eral class­room: if my aca­d­e­mic needs could have been met through in-​​class dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, per­haps that stigma would not have been so sig­nif­i­cant (and per­haps my friend would have got­ten the chal­leng­ing cur­ricu­lum he deserved).

But for­get about the aca­d­e­mic impli­ca­tions for a minute; labels and cat­e­go­riza­tion are detri­men­tal to our stu­dents as peo­ple. They over­whelm­ingly inform stu­dents’ sense of self and their rela­tion to oth­ers; they pigeon­hole, they seg­re­gate, and they ulti­mately do more harm than good. Even when those labels are more socially desired, like “gifted”, I feel it’s still kind of like say­ing, “but say­ing all Asians are good at math is a good stereotype!”

My vision for gifted edu­ca­tion in the 21st cen­tury is much the same as my vision for spe­cial edu­ca­tion in the 21st cen­tury, which also hap­pens to be sim­i­lar to my vision of gen­eral edu­ca­tion for the 21st cen­tury: to reimag­ine not only the cur­ricu­lum, but also the phys­i­cal and geo­graphic ele­ments of our schools. I wrote about this a few months ago, but to briefly re-​​cap: rethink the neces­sity of the 7.5 hour, Monday-​​Friday school day, rethink the role of the instruc­tor as deliv­erer of con­tent, and rethink the role of the stu­dent in terms of steer­ing their learn­ing in ways other than choos­ing a few elec­tives each year once they’re in high school. My hope is that indi­vid­u­al­iz­ing stu­dents’ for­mal edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence as much as pos­si­ble will reduce the need for labels such as the ones I describe above, either by allow­ing a wider vari­ety of needs to be met within the tra­di­tional class­room, or by elim­i­nat­ing the tra­di­tional class­room completely.

In the ini­tial email Ger­ald sent me to invite me to write this post, he indi­cated when he unveiled his new mis­sion state­ment for his district’s gifted edu­ca­tion pro­gram, “In among the many pos­i­tive and encour­ag­ing responses, a few peo­ple com­mented that, while the state­ments were nice, aren’t these things we should be doing with every stu­dent?” Indeed, none of what I’m putting forth in this blog post is rev­o­lu­tion­ary; Vygot­sky, Piaget, and Dewey laid the ground­work for this type of think­ing a long time ago. Despite, or per­haps espe­cially in light of, that fact, the ques­tion remains: why are we not doing this for all our stu­dents? Are the road­blocks phys­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal, geo­graphic, finan­cial, or other?

*Yes, I’m prob­a­bly con­sid­ered “smart” or “bright” by most aca­d­e­mic mea­sures, but con­sider: doing sim­ple men­tal math is very dif­fi­cult for me, I still take pause to con­sider my left from my right (bonus fun fact: up until my mid-​​twenties or so, I relied on a trick I devised when I was about 5 and owned shoes that had Win­nie the Pooh on one sole and Tig­ger on the other), I must write down every­thing I need to do or it won’t get done, I can’t change the oil in my car, and the most basic of house­hold hand­i­work tends to flum­mox me. Who’s gifted now?

Posted on March 4, 2011 by in Differentiation, Learning

Nonlinear Learning: Family Vacation

A cou­ple of days ago, I wrote about how schools often take the “camp bus” approach to learn­ing: load all the kids on the bus at the start of the year, take them all for the same ride, and arrive at the same destination.

Imag­ine a fam­ily trip planned this way. Grandpa calls the house one day and says, “We’re all going on vaca­tion to Dis­ney World this sum­mer. The whole fam­ily, kids, grand­kids, every­one.” Sounds won­der­ful, espe­cially when he adds that he’s paying.

“I already booked the hotel and the flight. We’re all meet­ing at the Philadel­phia air­port and fly­ing to Orlando.”

Prob­lem is Grandpa didn’t con­sider that these plans might not work for every­one in the fam­ily. Mom just found out she was preg­nant, due a month after the trip. She won’t be able to do much of any­thing in Dis­ney World, not to men­tion what Florida weather is like in August. Mom’s brother lives in Atlanta, so it makes lit­tle sense to have him come to Philadel­phia to fly to Orlando. Then there’s Mom’s sis­ter, who is a cast mem­ber at Dis­ney, so she’ll be work­ing through this “vacation.”

We could imag­ine a num­ber of other sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios that would affect the wis­dom of plan­ning a trip this way: Cousin Eddie won’t fly. The nephew gets vio­lently ill on any mov­ing vehi­cle (even the tram from the park­ing lot would be iffy). The new grand­daugh­ter is ter­ri­fied of mice. You get the idea.

How often in school do we make our kids get on the plane where we pre­de­ter­mined they need to get on? Instead, what if we were to show them the des­ti­na­tion and help them make their own way there?

Or bet­ter yet, let them choose their own des­ti­na­tion. Take it back to the vaca­tion: what’s the pur­pose? Is it fam­ily togeth­er­ness? Is it to have the Dis­ney Expe­ri­ence? Is it to be some­where warm? Let the fam­ily talk about all the pos­si­bil­i­ties and plan it together.

How could this play out in your school or class­room? How do we deal with the real­ity of com­mon stan­dards and imposed expec­ta­tions? We usu­ally respond to these with the con­ve­nience of the camp bus or the pre­arranged flight, but could there be other ways? How can we marry the non­lin­ear nature of learn­ing with the neatly scripted cur­ricu­lum that we are increas­ingly given?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by in Differentiation, Learning

Nonlinear Learning: The Camp Bus

When I was about 9, I went to Cub Scout day camp at Camp Del­mont for the first time. Every day, a group of us got on a bus and we rode for an hour or so. I had a great time, and at the end of the week, for rea­sons that I can’t now recall, my dad and I decided to take a ride up to the camp. So we hopped in the car, and Dad said, “Tell me which way to go.”

Now I had sat in the mid­dle of the bus and knew vaguely (at best) which way the bus had gone, but I did remem­ber one of the other kids com­ment­ing at one point that we were get­ting on the Turn­pike. Or was it the Express­way? No, Turn­pike, def­i­nitely. “Go to the Turn­pike.” We hadn’t gone more than a minute or two, when Dad took a left at an inter­sec­tion through which I was absolutely cer­tain the bus had gone straight. “No, Dad, go straight!” So he calmly got turned around and back onto the route I remembered.

Wasn’t long before I was com­pletely lost. But I wasn’t about to let Dad know that, after my absolute cer­tainty about the first turn. So he kept dri­ving, and I kept direct­ing him as best I could. “Are you sure you drove through Nor­ris­town?” he asked. “Yep, Dad, I’m sure. Right through here. Yep.”

Mirac­u­lously, or so it seemed at the time, we man­aged to end up at the camp, and I showed him all the places I had done stuff that week, and we had a great time. In ret­ro­spect, Dad, being the map king he is, prob­a­bly had already fig­ured out where the camp was and knew how to get us where we needed to go.

School has a ten­dency to work like the camp bus. At the start of the year (or a unit, or a chap­ter, or a les­son), we pile all the stu­dents on the bus, the teacher dri­ves us to camp, and the kids all get off. The teacher knows where we’re start­ing, where we want to end up, and the best way to get there. All the stu­dents have to do is go along for the ride.

The prob­lem comes when later the stu­dents have to make the jour­ney on their own. With­out the bus or the dri­ver, they get lost, miss turns, and lose track of where they’re going.

Learn­ing isn’t lin­ear, though, and the kids aren’t all at the same start­ing point. The process is much more com­plex and takes place in three (or more) dimen­sions. As a teacher it is far more effi­cient to plan the camp bus kind of les­son than to work in three dimen­sions, but it’s not about our con­ve­nience. In my next post, I will elab­o­rate more on the impli­ca­tions of non­lin­ear learn­ing as I con­sider what a fam­ily vaca­tion would look like if it were orga­nized accord­ing to school struc­tures. I will also be co-​​presenting a ses­sion with Mary Beth Hertz on this topic this Sat­ur­day at Teach­Meet NJ. If you’re in the area, come join us to con­tinue the conversation.

Posted on February 23, 2011 by in Technology

Why "I Don't Do Technology" Isn't Acceptable

The FAA Credit Union building which stands in for the Crime Lab in CSI: Miami.

Imag­ine an episode of CSI where the main char­ac­ter doesn’t “do” tech­nol­ogy:

“Tonight, on CSI: Miami, Hor­a­tio Caine inves­ti­gates a bru­tal crime wave using only his wits and his sun­glasses. He matches fin­ger­prints, tire tracks, and fiber samples…by hand! His new motto: ‘DNA? We don’t need no stink­ing DNA! Sher­lock Holmes got by with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass and a deer­stalker! Why do I need technology?’”


Imag­ine the con­ver­sa­tion you have with your doc­tor when he diag­nosed you with can­cer after a brief exam­i­na­tion.

“Aren’t you going to run some tests? Do a CT scan?” you ask.

“No, I’m really not com­fort­able with tech­nol­ogy. I man­age just fine with­out it.”


Ridicu­lous, no? Then why do we tol­er­ate sim­i­lar com­ments from educators?

Argu­ments go around and come back again about the role tech­nol­ogy should play in the class­room. Should it be a sub­ject? Should we have stan­dards? Should it be man­dated or optional? Some peo­ple argue that tech­nol­ogy is sim­ply a tool to be applied where and how it’s appro­pri­ate. Oth­ers say no tech­nol­ogy is neu­tral and we have to be delib­er­ate in our choices to use it.

In my view, tech­nol­ogy can’t be optional and it can’t be an add-​​on.

Tech­nol­ogy, accord­ing to my favorite dic­tio­nary, is “the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge” or “a capa­bil­ity given by the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge.” For an edu­ca­tor to say he or she doesn’t “do” that seems a lit­tle silly.

Of course when we talk about “tech­nol­ogy in the class­room” we’re usu­ally being a bit more spe­cific and refer­ring to dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. Even so, I think it should be unavoidable.

Every­thing that we can do using dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy can cer­tainly be done in some other way. As I under­stand it, tech­nol­ogy gives us three capa­bil­i­ties: to do things

  • More effi­ciently
  • More pre­cisely
  • More thor­oughly

Tech­nol­ogy advances give all of us—doctors, foren­sic sci­en­tists, teach­ers, and students—the abil­ity to make bet­ter deci­sions and solve more com­plex prob­lems. Do we have the right to say, “I don’t do that”? Per­haps if it were only an indi­vid­ual deci­sion. But edu­ca­tors have accepted respon­si­bil­ity for the growth of the stu­dents in their care, and choos­ing to avoid tech­nol­ogy for them­selves leaves their stu­dents with no choice.

So what am I miss­ing? Where has my logic taken a left turn? How does this play out in your situation?