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Teaching by NFL Rules: A Response to Fran Tarkenton

Posted on October 9, 2011 by in Leadership, Policy

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.

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

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

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.

Reforming Assumptions

Posted on February 2, 2011 by in Leadership, Policy

Achieve (dictionary definition)

I con­sider my blog a place to work out not-​​quite-​​crystallized thoughts and start con­ver­sa­tions. This post is an exam­ple of a topic that I need to wres­tle with, and I’m look­ing for your help to do so.

I wrote the other day about how Educon chal­lenged some of my assump­tions, and is con­tin­u­ing to do so. I have also been think­ing about where I per­son­ally land on the school reform move­ment. Much of what the “reformists” say grates on me and feels wrong for kids, but I believe part of that is because it feels like a per­sonal attack on my call­ing, my cho­sen pro­fes­sion, and my pas­sion for help­ing kids learn. I also real­ized that my under­stand­ing of the move­ment is based pri­mar­ily on what other peo­ple tell me it is. I have not spent enough time with the pri­mary source material.

So I decided to check it out for myself. I vis­ited the Stu­dents First web site, and read through the pol­icy agenda posted there. (A caveat: I have not read the entire doc­u­ment thoroughly—what fol­lows is based on the sum­maries at the site.) I was a bit sur­prised to find that they endorse many things that I believe are crit­i­cal to improv­ing edu­ca­tion: putting stu­dents first, ele­vat­ing the pro­fes­sion of teach­ing, striv­ing for excel­lence, using pub­lic resources wisely to sup­port learning.

Let me also say up front that I sup­port the prin­ci­ple of account­abil­ity and for elim­i­nat­ing inequities in pub­lic edu­ca­tion. I am not afraid of being held to a high stan­dard of per­for­mance and get­ting con­struc­tive feed­back and work­ing at improve­ment when I don’t live up to that stan­dard. (An aside: as an admin­is­tra­tor, I am now faced with the chal­lenge of how to pro­vide that kind of feed­back and help my teach­ers raise their game. I have not yet mas­tered that skill and am con­stantly reflect­ing on how I can do a bet­ter job.)

Dig­ging into the Stu­dent First agenda a bit fur­ther, I real­ize that they have used lan­guage that it would be dif­fi­cult to dis­agree with. It puts them in a pow­er­ful posi­tion to poten­tially argue, “If you oppose our move­ment, then you must not want to put stu­dents first,” or “you must be against ele­vat­ing the teach­ing profession.”

Hardly. Where we dif­fer though is on the assump­tions behind the words. Let’s take the issue of stu­dent achieve­ment. I absolutely want stu­dents to achieve. I also think that our stu­dents (speak­ing glob­ally, not about my dis­trict in par­tic­u­lar) prob­a­bly aren’t achiev­ing at the level they are capa­ble of. So how can I pos­si­bly dis­agree with Stu­dents First?

I don’t. What I dis­agree with is their def­i­n­i­tion of achieve­ment (which, by the way isn’t explic­itly stated at the site, unless I missed it). By infer­ence, and through my expe­ri­ence with NCLB, achieve­ment to this orga­ni­za­tion means per­for­mance on high-​​stakes read­ing and math tests. If this infer­ence is wrong, by the way, I wel­come feed­back from any­one famil­iar with the orga­ni­za­tion to point me to more thor­ough def­i­n­i­tions of the term so I can bet­ter under­stand it.

Please don’t mis­un­der­stand: I want my stu­dents to have excel­lent read­ing and math skills. I just don’t believe that an annual, week-​​long, mul­ti­ple choice test is ade­quate to judge these skills.

But I also think achieve­ment is a more com­plex, more sub­tle thing than this, and I’m not cer­tain Stu­dents First under­stands or is inter­ested in this. Again, if I’ve mis­char­ac­ter­ized the orga­ni­za­tion, show me—help me under­stand where I have it wrong, but to me their goal doesn’t really seem to be to help teach­ers get bet­ter, it seems to be to cat­e­go­rize all teach­ers as either “good” or “bad” and then to get rid of the bad ones.

The debate will never be resolved, and we will never be able to really com­mu­ni­cate and work together to cre­ate the best pos­si­ble edu­ca­tion for our chil­dren, until we can agree on the def­i­n­i­tions and assump­tions that form the foun­da­tion of the goals. The con­ver­sa­tion first needs to be about what achieve­ment means, what excel­lence means, what qual­ity means. Only then can we work on cre­at­ing effec­tive ways of eval­u­at­ing it—and I’m cer­tain those ways will involve mul­ti­ple mea­sures and mul­ti­ple criteria.

We could, and should, exam­ine much of the lan­guage on all sides of the debate about school reform to find the under­ly­ing assump­tions. I know I am look­ing much more closely at my own, and I chal­lenge you to do the same. What assump­tions do you have that color your responses and drive your think­ing? What am I not con­sid­er­ing here that I need to be? Where are the points of agree­ment we can work from to build consensus?

Why We Still Need Public Education

Posted on December 29, 2010 by in Policy

Fresco at the Library of Congress

Thomas Jef­fer­son invented pub­lic edu­ca­tion, the pur­pose of which, he said in a let­ter to John Tyler in 1810, is “to enable every man to judge for him­self what will secure or endan­ger his free­dom.” He believed that edu­ca­tion of all chil­dren, not just those whose fam­i­lies could pay for it, was essen­tial to the strength of the nation. Pub­lic edu­ca­tion was intended to acti­vate the poten­tial of everyone.

The object [of my edu­ca­tion bill was] to bring into action that mass of tal­ents which lies buried in poverty in every coun­try for want of the means of devel­op­ment, and thus give activ­ity to a mass of mind which in pro­por­tion to our pop­u­la­tion shall be the dou­ble or tre­ble of what it is in most coun­tries. (Thomas Jef­fer­son to M. Cor­rea de Serra, 1817)

Jef­fer­son also rein­vented the Library of Con­gress when he donated his per­sonal col­lec­tion. In a real and rev­o­lu­tion­ary sense, the LOC became the library of the peo­ple. In the South Read­ing Room, on the left half of the panel on the west wall, Jefferson’s view of Edu­ca­tion is illus­trated by the quo­ta­tion:

Edu­cate and inform the mass of the peo­ple. Enable them to see that it is their inter­est to pre­serve peace and order, and they will pre­serve them. Enlighten the peo­ple gen­er­ally, and tyranny and oppres­sion of the body and mind will van­ish like evil spir­its at the dawn of day.
Jef­fer­son to James Madi­son, Decem­ber 20, 1787 (first two sen­tences)
Jef­fer­son to P.S. Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816 (last sentence)

My fam­ily and I vis­ited Wash­ing­ton, DC, and toured the Library of Con­gress this sum­mer. I was over­whelmed by its scope, not only in phys­i­cal size, but in its mis­sion: in part, to “sus­tain and pre­serve a uni­ver­sal col­lec­tion of knowl­edge and cre­ativ­ity for future gen­er­a­tions.” Jef­fer­son felt that free­dom of access to all knowl­edge was a pre­req­ui­site for every­thing Amer­ica was going to be about.

I also find it fas­ci­nat­ing that Jef­fer­son had a lofty vision of pub­lic edu­ca­tion that would still be con­sid­ered pro­gres­sive today. To him, a dif­fer­en­ti­ated, student-​​centered edu­ca­tion is the cor­ner­stone of free­dom and happiness:

The gen­eral objects [of a bill to dif­fuse knowl­edge more gen­er­ally through the mass of the peo­ple] are to pro­vide an edu­ca­tion adapted to the years, to the capac­ity, and the con­di­tion of every one, and directed to their free­dom and hap­pi­ness. (Thomas Jef­fer­son, Notes on Vir­ginia; empha­sis is mine)

Crit­ics of pub­lic edu­ca­tion would have us aban­don this vision for a pri­va­tized, com­pet­i­tive mar­ket dri­ven by stan­dard­ized mea­sures of ade­quacy. I ques­tion the goal of this mar­ket. Instead of devel­op­ing the minds and buried tal­ents of its cit­i­zens, schools would be about man­u­fac­tur­ing a pro­duc­tive, com­pli­ant work­force. They call this “reform,” but it’s really just a highly-​​refined ver­sion of the sys­tem we’ve been build­ing for a hun­dred years. Con­sider for exam­ple that our cur­ricu­lum is no longer designed, it is pur­chased (a topic I will be devel­op­ing fur­ther in a future post).

Who in this new vision of edu­ca­tion will be the guardian of the inter­ests of the nation? The pro­tec­tor of free­dom and enlight­en­ment that Jef­fer­son sought for the nation’s cit­i­zens? I’m afraid that instead of enabling peo­ple to see that it is in their inter­est to pre­serve peace and order, the only inter­est schools will pro­mote is self-​​interest.

Stu­dents in Shang­hai recently blew the inter­na­tional PISA test out of the water. Reform­ers are telling us it is a wakeup call for Amer­i­can education.

Per­son­ally, I don’t want the kind of school that pro­duces results like this. Accord­ing to an NPR story today, Chi­nese stu­dents are trained to per­form on pre­cisely these kinds of mea­sures. Every­thing is rote. A mid­dle school prin­ci­pal put it this way: “Why don’t Chi­nese stu­dents dare to think? Because we insist on telling them every­thing. We’re not get­ting our kids to go and find things out for them­selves.” Per­for­mance on the uni­ver­sity entrance exam is judged strictly on whether stu­dents have mem­o­rized the stan­dard, accept­able answers to the ques­tions. Cre­ative, thought­ful answers are penalized.

Pub­lic schools are about the pub­lic inter­est. They are about empow­er­ing cit­i­zens, indi­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively, to pre­serve and pro­mote the free­doms and rights our founders argued and fought and risked their lives to estab­lish. If we lose the “pub­lic” in school, we lose the public.

Which Side of the Fence Is In?

Posted on October 10, 2010 by in Leadership, Learning, Policy

Waiting at the fenceFences exist to sep­a­rate the things inside from the things out­side. They pro­vide a bound­ary to define and sep­a­rate space, and safety for those inside.

Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors put up both lit­eral and metaphor­i­cal fences in schools. Rules, fire­walls, expec­ta­tions, codes of con­duct. “They are for the pro­tec­tion of the stu­dents,” we say, and we believe it. We feel that schools should be safe places for our chil­dren, and we want to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment in which they can learn.

But what do our lan­guage, atti­tude, and focus say about these fences? Why are they there, and which side of the fence is in? These things mat­ter, and they reveal a great deal about our schools.

Stu­dent hand­books, pol­icy man­u­als, and our daily inter­ac­tions with stu­dents are filled with words like these: don’t, can’t, con­trol, con­fine, restric­tion, infrac­tion, esca­late, inter­ven­tion, penalty, enforce, and impose. The chat­ter in the fac­ulty room revolves around the “good kids” and the “bad kids”.

Think about the frame of ref­er­ence where you are. Which term below rep­re­sents the atti­tude and focus of the adults? What is the cen­tral prin­ci­ple around which the sys­tem is set up?

  • Com­pli­ance or Cit­i­zen­ship?
  • Con­for­mity or Cour­tesy?
  • Enforce or Encour­age?
  • Obe­di­ence or Respect?
  • Restric­tions or Bound­aries?
  • Don’t or Ought?
  • Penalty or Result?

What are we really try­ing to pro­tect? The stu­dents? Or the school?

There are con­se­quences to our choice of vocab­u­lary, our atti­tude towards kids, and the things we choose to focus on every day. Stu­dents pick up on these things, and their own behav­ior, atti­tude, and lan­guage reflect the envi­ron­ment they experience.

What are you and your school say­ing to your stu­dents? Does the envi­ron­ment com­mu­ni­cate safety? The oppo­site is not, “You aren’t safe here.” It’s worse. It actu­ally says, “You are dan­ger­ous.” Which puts them on the out­side of the fence look­ing in. And that’s no place to learn.

The Future of Gifted Education

Posted on August 18, 2010 by in Gifted, Policy

The third post in our sum­mer series on gifted edu­ca­tion comes from Jerry Blu­men­garten, bet­ter known to many as Cybrary Man (@cybraryman1 on Twitter). Cybrary Man taught sev­eral sub­jects over 32 years in one of the tough­est areas of NYC, the last 12 years of that as the teacher-​​librarian of his mid­dle school. He started Cybrary Man’s Edu­ca­tional Web Sites as a library site and it now serves all grade lev­els and sub­ject areas. He has also writ­ten edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als for the util­ity indus­try over the past 30 years. Most recently, Jerry gave the keynote at ntcamp in Philadel­phia.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have per­se­ver­ance and above all con­fi­dence in our­selves. We must believe that we are gifted for some­thing and that this thing must be attained. (Marie Curie)


Stu­dents, teach­ers and par­ents need us to change the way we deliver and sup­port our gifted edu­ca­tion programs.

One of the great­est learn­ing expe­ri­ences that my son had was while work­ing on his West­ing­house Sci­ence (now Intel) project. He had the oppor­tu­nity to work directly with sci­en­tists once a week at a Sci­ence Insti­tute. I did not mind car­pool­ing until he got his license, because I saw the great value in this con­nec­tion between stu­dents and spe­cial­ists work­ing in the real world. Local busi­nesses and med­ical facil­i­ties could pro­vide stu­dents with hands-​​on train­ing and intern­ships and the pro­fes­sion­als there could act as men­tors. On a Mid­dle School level, my school had a Health Careers Pro­gram that gave our stu­dents a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to do com­mu­nity ser­vice while learn­ing along with med­ical and sup­port staff in hos­pi­tals, clin­ics, nurs­ing homes and senior centers.

We should be tak­ing this same approach with our gifted stu­dents. We can eas­ily accom­plish this with the plethora of great web tools and our abil­ity to con­nect with Skype, etc. Dis­tance learn­ing has to be revived with the lat­est tech tools. We should also be mak­ing bet­ter asso­ci­a­tions with higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions. Pro­vi­sions can be estab­lished for gifted high school stu­dents to earn col­lege cred­its with col­leges. We have to do more to join our stu­dents with experts out­side the tra­di­tional class­room walls. I can envi­sion Ellu­mi­nate ses­sions with experts in a wide range of fields address­ing and answer­ing ques­tions from stu­dents. This should be stan­dard pro­ce­dure in classes. It would also be nice to have stu­dents shadow pro­fes­sion­als in dif­fer­ent fields We also have to exam­ine how indi­vid­ual stu­dents learn best. Some need struc­tured learn­ing envi­ron­ments where oth­ers need less struc­tured learn­ing experiences.

All pre­ser­vice, grad­u­ate and lead­er­ship edu­ca­tion pro­grams should include spe­cial­ized train­ing for teach­ing and men­tor­ing gifted learn­ers. Empha­sis should be focused on dif­fer­en­ti­ated edu­ca­tion of gifted learners

Teach­ers must also reach out to local muse­ums. The Philadel­phia Museum of Art, for exam­ple, has the Wachovia Edu­ca­tion Resources Cen­ter that helps teach­ers use art and art images to enhance lessons in core cur­ric­u­lar areas. The Explorato­rium in San Fran­cisco pro­vides tools to make your work eas­ier and more enrich­ing, includ­ing things to do at the museum, hands-​​on activ­i­ties, and a wealth of Web fea­tures about impor­tant sci­ence top­ics. Each year more than 10,000 edu­ca­tors take advan­tage of The Field Museum’s resources for pro­fes­sional development.

Reflect­ing on my own edu­ca­tion I felt that the best classes I had on the under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate lev­els were ones that were taught by peo­ple who actu­ally worked in that field or were called in as experts.

I feel that there has to be a strong com­mit­ment to gifted pro­grams, the ongo­ing train­ing of gifted teach­ers as well as all school staff mem­bers, and follow-​​up research on chil­dren who have gone through these pro­grams. Coun­sel­ing and guid­ance ser­vices must be pro­vided on a con­tin­u­ous basis for gifted students.

More sup­port ser­vices not only for the chil­dren but their par­ents to help them deal with their chil­dren are also needed. Every school dis­trict should have a gifted edu­ca­tion school committee.

Much should be done to improve the deliv­ery of edu­ca­tion for our gifted stu­dents to meet the chal­lenges of the 21st Century.

[Please check out Jerry’s Gifted and Tal­ented page: http://​cybrary​man​.com/​g​i​f​t​e​d​.​h​tml]

Help Define "21st Century Education"

Posted on July 31, 2010 by in Leadership, Policy

One of the things that has drawn me to the par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tors whom I fol­low on Twit­ter is that they have a pas­sion for help­ing stu­dents learn bet­ter. Over the last cou­ple of years, I have heard and par­tic­i­pated in a lot of con­ver­sa­tions about so-​​called “21st cen­tury” learn­ing, edu­ca­tion, teach­ing, etc. There seem to be a lot of assump­tions about what this means.

We have the Partern­ship for 21st Cen­tury Skills, of course, but this seems to be only one dimen­sion of what many talk about when they men­tion 21st cen­tury education.

I’ve been hav­ing a hard time wrap­ping my head around it, so to get some help from my col­leagues and com­pile all of the var­i­ous thoughts and ideas about the con­cept into one place, I’ve put together a Google doc­u­ment called “Com­pare & Con­trast 20th/​21st Cen­tury Edu­ca­tion”. OK, not a spec­tac­u­lar title, I admit. But I thought that if we could gen­er­ate a list of how mod­ern edu­ca­tion can, should, or does dif­fer from the “old way” of doing things, maybe that would help me get a bet­ter han­dle on it. And if it helps some other peo­ple in the process, so much the better.

To take it to another level, Kim Printz (@paperwerksart on Twit­ter) asked me this tonight:

@geraldaungst i’m lov­ing the con­ver­sa­tion. but where does this go? who would this doc­u­ment go to, for exam­ple? our sys­tem is STUCK!Sun Aug 01 02:04:49 via webkim printz
paperwerksart

So I’ve added a sec­tion at the bot­tom of the doc­u­ment to share ideas about what to do with this list. Where should it go? How can we use it to impact schools and stu­dents? Come join both parts of the con­ver­sa­tion, and add your thoughts to the list. Then take the list and share it with some­one: a col­league, a par­ent, a prin­ci­pal. In the end, what mat­ters most is not how we define 21st cen­tury edu­ca­tion, but how we apply it to help stu­dents learn.

Consumer-Driven Education

Posted on July 15, 2010 by in Policy

The Cabs of Times Square, by joiseyshowaa

I had a wide-​​ranging con­ver­sa­tion over cof­fee the other day with David Tim­ony (@drtimony on Twit­ter). One of the things that came up was the idea of stu­dents as con­sumers. David is doing research about what con­sti­tutes an expert teacher, focus­ing on teacher behav­iors that influ­ence stu­dent per­cep­tions of exper­tise. It got me think­ing about how we treat teach­ers and stu­dents in the big pic­ture and the busi­ness of edu­ca­tion today.

For a long time, edu­ca­tors have been told we need to run schools more like busi­nesses, that the stu­dents are the con­sumers, and we need to let the mar­ket drive our meth­ods. We should mea­sure stu­dent per­for­mance and stu­dent reac­tion like cor­po­ra­tions mea­sure con­sumer pref­er­ence and adjust our meth­ods to pro­duce the out­comes (increased sales) that we are look­ing for.

I have a prob­lem with this approach, though. It pre­sumes that the stu­dents are pas­sive recip­i­ents of the edu­ca­tion we are pro­duc­ing. It also leads to a mar­ket where many of the pro­duc­ers (schools) resort to manip­u­la­tive and decep­tive tac­tics to increase the num­bers. We only need to look at recent news on Wall Street to see that reliance on one met­ric to judge per­for­mance can not only cause prob­lems but it can affect the entire econ­omy. Is this really what we want for education?

What if we turn the model upside down? What if we think of the stu­dents not as con­sumers but as the producers?

In the mar­ket­place, cor­po­ra­tions have a lot of con­trol over their prod­uct, their meth­ods, their adver­tis­ing, but they are ulti­mately depen­dent on the con­sumer to judge their prod­ucts and make them suc­cess­ful. The con­sumers also pro­vide a great deal of feed­back to the com­pa­nies about what works, what doesn’t, and how they can improve their prod­ucts to make them more suc­cess­ful. In addi­tion, cor­po­ra­tions have to work within an exist­ing envi­ron­ment that dic­tates much of what they must do to suc­ceed: laws, tax struc­tures, sup­pli­ers, com­pe­ti­tion, investors, and so on.

If stu­dents become the pro­duc­ers, they will have to work in the envi­ron­ment cre­ated by the schools and teach­ers, includ­ing cur­ricu­lum, stan­dards, and so on. The teach­ers become the con­sumers, pro­vid­ing feed­back and guid­ing the learn­ing process (roughly par­al­lel to R&D in the cor­po­rate world).

This model is far from per­fect, of course. There is a great deal about learn­ing and about school that doesn’t fit into the busi­ness approach. But if we’re going to be asked, or even required, to do busi­ness like a busi­ness, then let’s really exam­ine that model and think hard about what it means for kids.

The Three I's of Curriculum

Posted on July 5, 2010 by in Content and Methods, Design, Policy

Last week I wrote about how design prin­ci­ples should apply to cur­ricu­lum. I’ve been think­ing about one of those ele­ments in par­tic­u­lar: the idea of white space. This isn’t really a new con­cept, but I think it bears some examination.

Cur­ricu­lum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every lit­tle thing that may have some impor­tance or rel­e­vance to a sub­ject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as home­work. Any teacher who has been teach­ing for more than a year knows that there is no prac­ti­cal way to com­plete the entire pre­scribed cur­ricu­lum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the high­lights to the stu­dents as you cruise by at sev­enty miles and hour.

I’m no longer con­vinced that the pur­pose of cur­ricu­lum is to assem­ble in one place all the impor­tant “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s impor­tant any­way, we won’t all agree on which things are truly impor­tant, and the vol­ume increases almost daily.

So what if cur­ricu­lum instead were designed with holes, with a cer­tain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings atten­tion to the other ele­ments of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Tak­ing out some stuff and leav­ing more space in the cur­ricu­lum can do sim­i­lar things for the student.

Invite. Cur­ricu­lum should first be built so that the stu­dent wants to engage with the con­tent. It should be active, it should be inter­est­ing, it should be per­sonal. Make it real and rel­e­vant. Start with where the stu­dents are. Con­nect to their inter­ests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the cur­ricu­lum should moti­vate stu­dents to want to learn about the sub­ject. The word inspire orig­i­nally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breath­ing”. There is very lit­tle breath­ing room in today’s cur­ricu­lum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learn­ing. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the cur­ricu­lum must light the fire. Leave stu­dents at the end of the unit or school year feel­ing like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their pas­sions and their nat­ural curios­ity, they will con­tinue to pur­sue it on their own.

I remem­ber so many times “dis­cov­er­ing” a sub­ject as a teacher that I thought I had no inter­est in learn­ing about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fas­ci­nat­ing and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-​​designed cur­ricu­lum can do that for students.

Under­stand that I don’t believe cur­ricu­lum can do this alone. None of these things can or will hap­pen with­out an excel­lent teacher. Cur­ricu­lum doesn’t live until stu­dents and teach­ers inter­act and engage it. But a strong cur­ricu­lum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accom­plish these things more easily.

Accom­plish­ing this is the real chal­lenge, of course. How do we cre­ate a cur­ricu­lum that does these things? How do we antic­i­pate where kids are when there are so many dif­fer­ent var­ied expe­ri­ences around the world? Per­haps this is an argu­ment for purely locally designed cur­ric­ula, but I’m not sure that’s prac­ti­cal. What do you think? How can we make this hap­pen? Or is it just a fan­tasy that will never become reality?

What Is 21st Century Gifted Education?

Posted on June 19, 2010 by in Announcements, Gifted, Policy

Gifted edu­ca­tion has been around for over a cen­tury. Researchers have stud­ied what it means to be gifted, and what are the best meth­ods for edu­cat­ing the gifted. It has been an uphill jour­ney for many rea­sons. A great num­ber of peo­ple believe that there is no need to pro­vide gifted edu­ca­tion, that it is elit­ist and unfair, and that gifted kids will do fine any­way, so why waste energy and resources on spe­cial pro­grams for them?

It is not my pur­pose today to engage in this debate. But I keep com­ing back to a com­ment that was made to me recently in con­nec­tion with a project I’m doing at work. My dis­trict is in the midst of a com­pre­hen­sive review and analy­sis of our gifted pro­gram. As part of that review, we have cre­ated a new vision and mis­sion state­ment for the gifted pro­gram. (For the curi­ous among you, it is posted here)

I shared the draft of that doc­u­ment with my admin­is­tra­tion, then unveiled it pub­licly for the first time at a school board meet­ing. 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?

This echoes sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments I’ve heard for as long as I’ve been teach­ing. Of course the answer is yes; though the empha­sis for the gen­eral edu­ca­tion cur­ricu­lum and pro­gram will be on dif­fer­ent kinds of things, the “stuff” that for so long was the core of gifted edu­ca­tion has become part of the main­stream 21st cen­tury emphasis.

It got me think­ing about what gifted edu­ca­tion should look like in today’s schools. Is it still nec­es­sary in an age when high level think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion, tech­nol­ogy, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, and inclu­sion are grow­ing in their impor­tance and reach in our schools? I believe it is, but my thoughts are con­tin­u­ing to evolve about what it should do and how.

So what should gifted edu­ca­tion be in the 21st cen­tury? I don’t know. Yet. But I’ve invited a col­lec­tion of peo­ple who have had a tremen­dous influ­ence on my learn­ing and think­ing to help me answer that ques­tion. Over the next sev­eral weeks, eleven peo­ple who I con­sider col­leagues and friends will be guests on this blog, wrestling with that very ques­tion. I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing what they have to say. I hope you are too.

Posts in this series:

Empow­er­ing the Future, by Mary Beth Hertz
What Does It Mean to Be Gifted Now? by Tony Bal­dasero
The Future of Gifted Edu­ca­tion, by Jerry Blu­men­garten
I Don’t Know, by Jeff Aga­menoni
Gifted but Lack­ing?, by Kevin Wash­burn
What If Every Child Was Gifted?, by Brandi Jor­dan
Gifted Edu­ca­tion in the 21st Cen­tury, by Damian Bariexca