What “Inquiring Minds” Need to Know

There are many discussions happening about 21^st Century teaching and learning. Lots of conversations about skills such as collaboration, adaptability, creativity, effective communication and the ability to analyze and synthesize information.

How do we help kids prepare for a world where knowledge is abundant and opportunities for learning are everywhere?

One strategy for bridging this gap is the use of an “Inquiry” or “Active Learning” lesson design. Although not exactly new, the use of inquiry is challenging for teachers, students and parents who are unfamiliar with it. Randall D. Knight at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo has compiled a list of research-based active learning strategies most suitable for teaching physics in his book, Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching (Addison Wesley, 2004). These strategies for active learning and inquiry can apply to any content area but have been used in science education for years.

Knight points out that active learning strategies have five traits, which are quoted here from his 2004 book:

•   Students spend much of class time actively engaged in physics. The engagement consists of thinking, talking, and doing physics, not merely listening to someone else talk about physics.

•   Students interact with their peers. Communication between and among individual students and groups is an important component of knowledge construction - developing, sharing, and evaluating ideas and processes.

•   Students receive immediate feedback on their work. Students receive corrective feedback from their peers or the teacher as appropriate to the learning situation. Students must have a standard against which to measure their propositional and procedural knowledge.

•   The instructor is more of a facilitator, less of a conveyor of knowledge. The saying, "The teacher should be a guide on the side, and not a sage on the stage" is a statement that helps make the point. Students should "construct" knowledge from observations and reflections whenever possible. This includes the development of concepts and laws from first-hand laboratory experiences.

•   Students take responsibility for their knowledge. This includes student metacognition (knowing what one knows and doesn't know) and self regulation (bringing oneself into compliance with expectations).

Inquiry is more difficult than it may sound. It is a strategy that challenges many of our traditional ideas about how classrooms should be organized and what teachers should be doing. It feels “loosely constructed” and can be particularly hard for students who are most successful when they have very clear guidelines and feel most effective when given highly organized directions. Inquiry feels sloppy at times and requires a very different kind of thinking.

It is critical that students gain understanding and practice with inquiry-based lessons because they mimic many of the experiences that they will have when they participate in college coursework and the workplace. Employers continue to echo that they need talented young people who are able to find creative solutions to problems without needing a lot of direction. Successful people today are prepared to create their own jobs and not assume that they will one day be working for someone else.

Inquiry is important. We have to model it and help our kids have the “grit” to figure things out.

How important is “getting it right?”

In a recent presentation at Maker Faire in New York City, internet marketing “guru,” Hastings resident, author and occasional education blogger Seth Godin, one of my favorite paradigm changers says, “If you’re doing something that might not work, then you are doing something important.”

It made me think about 21^st Century teaching and learning and reminds me that it is very important to continue to highlight the fact that we do not have all the answers, we expect to not always get it right and we embrace the chance to “learn by doing” and try new things while embracing “failure.”

Isn’t this what we are telling kids about learning? 

In his recent TED book Why School,? Will Richardson, educator, blogger, speaker and colleague who recently presented at our Dobbs Ferry Schools Superintendent’s Conference Day talks about the notion that traditional schools were designed for a society where knowledge was scarce. He writes about an earlier society that needed to attend school in order to acquire knowledge and information.

In contrast, our world today is one of knowledge over-load. Information is everywhere. The challenge becomes one of filtering and collecting data, news, statistics, facts, figures and intelligence in order to “make meaning” and understand a new reality. As educators, this is a seismic shift in our roles and our thinking.

In pondering the opportunities and challenges, I am very heartened to be surrounded by teachers, administrators and a Board of Education in Dobbs Ferry that embraces this new landscape. Since the end of school last year, we have made a collective commitment to working together to understand how technology can help us expand and change the way that we think about teaching and learning. This is not just geared to our students, but for us too.

This week, we will debut our first monthly staff coordinated and driven professional development sessions designed to help us share our knowledge about technology tools with each other. The entire initiative is grounded in the idea that none of us are experts, but we have ALL learned some new-age instructional and technology skills over the last few months and feel comfortable about sharing these with our colleagues. We are ALL working to find ways to connect new ideas with new pathways for student learning.

In Dobbs Ferry, we recognize that traditional economics may be scarce, but in-house we have no shortage of talent, dedication and passion for teaching and learning.  And so ….sometimes we may not always get things right ……but we know for sure that we are doing something important.

So What About Those Field Tests?

I received an email on Friday from a parent with some important questions about the administration of “field tests” to our students. He was interested in my opinion of the recent parent push back toward these tests as well as parents who are choosing to “opt out” of these tests for their children.

I thought I would share my thoughts and responses to him in light of the growing discourse around the issue since there is lots of chatter and questions in Dobbs Ferry and the surrounding towns over these past few days.

Dear Dobbs Ferry Parent:

The parent push back toward standardized testing is directed in a large part (at this particular time) at the administration of field tests by Pearson Inc. It is also important to note that we have Dobbs Ferry parents who are part of a consortium of parents from all of the Rivertown schools as well as parents from many other districts in Rockland, Westchester and Long Island who have organized to lobby Albany about unfunded mandates in schools as well as standardized testing. All of these district parent groups have posted the same petition on their websites calling for parents to sign the petition related to field tests and increased time and emphasis on standardized tests in general. Their intention is to send these petitions to Albany and make their voices heard as parents and constituents.

Since you have asked for my opinion as the Dobbs Ferry superintendent I am happy to share it with you. I believe that standardized tests in their current form are a waste of valuable instructional time and provide useless information when used in isolation which is how they are used by the New York State Department of Education. The fact that we are required to waste further instructional time on "field tests" which will be used to construct additional meaningless tests is, in my opinion, appalling. I am certainly not against standardized tests. In fact, I am a strong supporter of quality assessment practices designed to allow our students to demonstrate what they know and understand. The issue lies in the fact that the standardized tests currently administered do not do this in any way. The current tests are designed to provide a measurement that is cheap and easily scored by Pearson. Hence, the field tests do certainly provide Pearson with the information they need to produce more shallow assessments with limited usefulness to teachers in their work with curriculum design and addressing student needs.

As for having a positive bearing on our kids, I can't imagine anything positive for our kids about assessment practices in their current form. A much better measurement would include shorter, more frequent formative assessments that are performance based and would provide teachers with ongoing feedback so that they can make continued instructional adjustments based on the needs of individual students. These can certainly be standardized and could be used in an aggregate way to provide the kind of teacher accountability that all of us would like to see.

Boycotting "field tests" would not have any effect on student classroom grades however we, like most schools, certainly use student performance on standardized tests as one measure when looking to place students in programs. This is always done in conjunction with teacher recommendations and other internal assessment measures. This does not apply to field tests since we do not receive feedback about field test performance by individual student. Feedback about performance on field tests sometimes is only used by the testing company and is never even shared with districts. 

Boycotting standardized tests that are not considered field tests could certainly have negative impact on our schools, our scores and the scores used as part of the new teacher evaluation process. These tests are similarly flawed but ramifications for boycotting them is more complicated for all involved. This would really need to be better researched and I believe that the parent consortium advocacy groups will more than likely explore this.

I think that parents questioning and voicing their concerns is really important at this moment in time. Unfortunately, the New York State Department of Education is not interested in the voices of professional educators and many of the issues associated with this have been created by the educators themselves. Nonetheless, it is critical that we stand up for the education of our children and advocate for classrooms where instruction is dynamic, student centered, innovative and not a "test prep" laboratory designed to "get kids ready for the test."

So ……there you have it. This is what I think and I applaud our Dobbs Ferry parents and all parents who are beginning to organize and make their voices heard in Albany and across our communities. It is time we spent our time and efforts working toward quality assessment practices. It is what is best for our kids, our teachers and our schools.

Where I Stand on Differentiated Instruction

Call me part of the digital education revolution, but I am just going to say it …. You need access to technology in order to more effectively differentiate instruction.

To ask teachers to meet the needs of all learners using differentiated worksheets, different textbooks, flexible grouping -- which by the way simply translates into homogeneous grouping within the same classroom-- with the teacher running around the room like an athlete on the track team trying to give some modicum of individual attention to every student and/or every group, is just plain impossible.  And more importantly, the kids are not getting what they need. They are not really being challenged or helped to become self-directed learners because we are still working way too hard to construct a gamut of appropriate multiple learning activities for them.

 To “differentiate” means to make different.

And in most classrooms in most schools, we are doing very little differently. We are pretty much doing the same thing we have been doing for the last 50 years; probably longer.

If you want to get an idea of the complexity of differentiating instruction, I would invite you to explore the Universal Design for Learning  website at www.udlcenter.org and take a look at the model lesson plans. Consider the level of expertise and time that would be involved with thinking through the differentiated activities, testing them out, redesigning the lesson and reflecting on the student outcomes. And keep in mind that these are single lessons. Think about an entire school year and an entire course of study. Think about the fact that even the most talented, and dedicated “uber” teachers would occasionally, when they are not in their classrooms, actually need some time to …..perhaps ….have a life.  Absent of spending every waking hour working with colleagues to design these kinds of lessons for ever single class and every single student; I think it is fair to say that we are asking a lot. 

I’m a big proponent of differentiation, but I also believe in the power of technology. And I believe it is the means by which we can most effectively help teachers differentiate instruction to its fullest degree. 

Picture this:

·         Teachers use social networks to engage students with their peers in other schools, in other states, in other countries and around the globe to share their ideas and their work.

·         We “flat out” ban worksheets …. period ….no more worksheets projected on the SMART Boards, no more paper worksheets, electronic worksheets …..can we just try this? Maybe start with a “No Worksheet Week” and see what happens?

·         Teachers and students embrace and take risks with project based learning (project based learning is synonymous with learning in depth). We educate and actively engage parents about project based learning and what they can expect and not expect to see in this kind of learning environment. (These activities are designed to answer a question or solve a problem and generally reflect the types of “lifewide” learning and work people do in the everyday world outside the classroom).

·         As a community we are willing to commit resources to teacher professional development that helps them to understand inquiry based lesson design, and then support them as they engage in an inquiry based instructional approach. (An old adage states: "Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand." The last part of this statement is the essence of inquiry based learning)

·         Teachers talking to parents and parents talking to teachers about instruction, having conversations where EVERYONE – teachers, administrators, parents and students --are learners knowing that they are valued equally in the learning community.

·         Parents letting go of the “great idea, love risk-taking” as long as it is with someone else’s child philosophy; this attitude hinders teachers from trying new and innovative strategies.

So back to why I think that differentiation is more and more dependent on technology.  In his paper for the Centre for Strategic Education www.cse.edu.au  Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto says, “Teachers need to get grounded in instruction, so that they can figure out WITH students how to best engage technology.”  He believes that technology can be a dramatic accelerator if we put instruction and skilled motivated teachers and students in the lead.

Kids and teachers need to be able to access the internet in any classroom in our buildings. Both students and teachers must learn to effectively leverage the power of social networks.  True exploration with inquiry involves students developing personal learning networks where they can access on-the-job professionals and academic mentors. Project based learning in its most highly evolved state requires students to work together in groups, and work as a team to design and demonstrate their understanding of central concepts and principles of a discipline. Quite frankly, they will probably facilitate this process most readily on Facebook. 

Whether students bring their own devices to school and are permitted to use them in the classroom; whether we give teachers tablet computers so that they can have their resources always in hand; whether we furnish kids with low cost tablets, netbooks or iPads ….. 

We simply must do things differently, if we want to make the most of differentiated instruction.

Why I Love To Talk To Parents

In September I invited the parents in my school district to join me in reading Tony Wagner’s text The Global Achievement Gap. As you may recall from my early blogs the Wagner text speaks to the Seven Survival Skills necessary for students to be successful in the 21^st Century. He talks about why schools - even the best schools - are failing in this regard. He also talks about what needs to happen to change the educational paradigm rooted in an industrial education model which is ineffective and obsolete.Wagner was the key note speaker today in Boston at the Learning and the Brain Conference and the message is resonating with educators and social scientists from across the country.

In recent weeks, my conversations with parents have been fascinating, enlightening and encouraging. I am learning that parents:

• ·         Are passionately interested in the education of their children
• ·         Value innovation and creativity over teaching to the test
• ·         Wish that we would talk more about engaging students in learning and not engaging them to take tests
• ·         Believe that if students are learning to be critical thinkers, adept problem solvers, collaborative work partners, influencers, leaders and self-directed learners …..the tests will take care of themselves.
• ·         Embrace the philosophy of the International Baccalaureate program but would like to understand more about it
• ·         Want to understand how they can engage meaningfully with our teachers and administrators; especially at the middle and high school; understanding that there is a changing dynamic at these levels but still a place for them to be active and valued as parents
• ·         Believe that there are many extraordinary teachers in our schools and strongly support all efforts to give teachers the professional development resources necessary  to grow and develop their skills
• ·         Understand that they can and do play a critical role in maintaining the necessary community support for our schools especially in these challenging economic times
• ·         Agree that we need to do more to improve technology resources and the use of technology in our classrooms to enhance the instructional program

Although our book chats always begin with discussion of the Wagner text, we quickly move on to parent perceptions, experiences, concerns and hopes for growth in our schools. As one parent expressed recently, “I felt like I was part of a ‘think tank’ and we were thinking together about how we could explore ideas for richer experiences and improvements.”

Parents need to be partners in learning. Educators need to embrace instead of exclude them.

Game On!

I have never been a gamer.

And I will totally date myself here by saying that I was never into Pac Man, I don’t own an X-Box or a Wii and I was generally not following the connections between games and the classroom.

That is until a couple of summer’s ago at the Harvard Graduate School’s Future of Learning Institute where I both learned to “tweet” and had the opportunity to attend a session with Chris Dede, Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard. 

And I thought …whoa! 

He was talking about disruptive innovations and that the disruptive innovation heading toward our classrooms was the customization of individual needs. This was way beyond  differentiating instruction. Chris Dede talks about a full customization of the learning process that is student driven. 

Imagine. 

Students understanding themselves in ways that allow them to create the learning situations which will help them to meet their goals as individual learners.

And then we talked about gaming.

At the recent New York State Council of School Superintendents Conference in Saratoga Springs, Mary Cullinane, Director of Innovation – US Partners of Learning for Microsoft Corporation focused part of her  presentation on gaming. 

She shared an amazing statistic ….. that kids playing video games fail at the game 80% of the time.

 Think about that  …….and think about what do they do every time they fail? 

They go back for more!

When I get a mental image of what this type of perseverance and persistence would look like inside our classrooms I am filled with excitement. Kids so engaged with an activity or a concept that if they failed to understand it 80% of the time they would willingly and of their own volition keep going back until they got it.

 Just picture that! 

Consider the incredible implications this holds for learning. 

In the September issues of “the Journal,” an educational technology publication which you can check out at www.thejournal.com writer Charlene O’Hanlon talks about “a new generation of gamers who are not just picking up skills by playing video games – they’re learning by designing an creating games themselves.” In her article she explains that game creation as a learning tool is really just a digital-age take on the learning-by-doing approach to teaching. All of the current curriculum re-design work being done in schools across the country is being structured to include more opportunities for project-based learning. We know that students pick up concepts more easily and retain more information when they are hands-on with their subject matter. 

I am especially drawn to the use of Gamestar Mechanic because it is targeted toward middle school students. There is much research that points toward middle school as the time when many students disengage from learning; especially boys. Gamestar Mechanic is built on a foundation of pedagogical research that includes systems thinking, digital literacy skills and STEM learning. It is being used in 800 schools and the basic program is free. 

I would encourage you to check out some of the following websites:

www.gamestarmechanic.com

www.worldwideworkshop.org/programs/globaloria

www.elinemedia.com

I am convinced that the use of games as part of the instructional program holds endless opportunities for our students to practice 21^st Century skills such as communication, problem-solving, collaboration and teamwork. These skills simply cannot be replicated in the same way by traditional classroom activities. 

According to David Samuelson, Executive Vice President and Director of Games and Augmented Reality at Pearson and co-moderator of the working group that focuses on game-based learning within the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), “we are graduating through the stage where we’ve accepted that games are now a part of society, and we’re looking for the best ways to incorporate them into the teaching environment. It’s a natural progression.”

So …..to innovative teachers willing to embrace the redesign of teaching and learning for our 21^st Century classrooms ….

Game On!

Ask A Sixth Grader

Change is good and these are exciting times! As the new superintendent in Dobbs Ferry, I have been trying to unravel the “state of the schools” in an effort to pick an entry point for where to begin. As is the case with all schools, we are attempting to “change the tire while the car is moving.” How do we establish the technological culture that will inspire, educate and empower all students to be successful participants in a 21^st Century global society?

We began over the summer with our Board members and administrators reading Tony Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap. The text grapples with the issues facing all schools in teaching our students what Wagner refers to as the “seven survival skills” that our children need in order to be successful in a global society.

In November, I am beginning a series of Parent Book Chats coordinated by our District PTSA. Hosted in neighborhood homes, we will meet in groups of 10-12 parents to discuss the Wagner text and engage in dialogue about the kinds of things we want our students to be able to know and do when they graduate from Dobbs Ferry High School. It is hard for me to imagine a group more invested in the changes that need to occur. After all, every parent holds high hopes and dreams for their child including the ability to secure a decent job and become a contributing member of society.

Today, I met with a group of our new sixth graders. This is their first year in Middle School and .their ideas and feedback on what they think would make their learning more relevant astounded me. In a recent piece in The Next Web, entitled “What today’s Digital Native children can teach the rest of us about technology,” Neela Sakaria, Senior Vice President of Latitude (a research consulting company to leaders in content, technology and learning) explains that research is “focused on giving children a real voice in the broader, often very adult, discussion of future technologies and real-world problem solving. We believe that kids are the architects of the future- they’re creative, have an intuitive relationship with technology and have proven that they think in extraordinarily sophisticated ways about how tech can enhance their learning, play and interactions with people and things around them.”

The sixth graders were explaining to me that one of the things new to them this year was having different subject area classes and that they really needed to be more organized. I asked them the obvious question, “What are you doing to keep yourselves more organized?” They started by explaining that they were using multiple folders and binders to keep all the class work separate, but that there was always lots of “stuff” on their desks because of the various papers, folders and notebooks.

I was fascinated by this since I was thinking “how many adults in the “real world” use notebooks and folders to keep themselves organized?” I will admit to a small number of file folders in my office but …really ….do we think that this is the way that these kids will one day structure their homes and offices? Unable to contain my curiosity about how the students would respond, I asked “Do you think there is any other way to keep yourselves organized?”

Well … I wish you could have been there. Without having any knowledge of Wagners’ “seven survival skills,” our students’ answers demonstrated many of the attributes that he cites are imperative for the next generation to master including critical thinking, understanding resources, problem solving, adapting technology, analyzing information and imagination. Here are some of their creative ideas:

• “Everyone should have an iPad because when we get home we have an ipad and we just use online folders to organize our work.”

• “I think that someone would have to write the code, but you should be able to bring your iPad to school and log on to a network where all of your game apps are disabled while you are in school.”

• “If kids don’t have money to buy an iPad they should able to rent one from the school.”

• “If you added up all the money that the school is going to spend on paper for us from the time we are in sixth grade to twelfth grade it would probably cost the same as an iPad. Using technology is a better environmental solution.”

• “All the desks in the school should have a ‘built in’ iPad so that whatever classroom you went into, you would just log-in to the iPad in the classroom.”

Trying to put aside the pros and cons of ipads vs. netbooks vs. laptops, the larger conversation revolves around why our classrooms are so disconnected from what our students encounter and engage in during their daily life? Why are they being forced to “power down” when they walk through our doors? The research being done by Latitude has found that today’s children perceive a very seamless connection between online and offline worlds.

The pivotal question is “how willing are we to hear what our digital native children are telling us, and what are we willing to do about it?”