A Future of Technology Rich Education, Preferably Without Multiple Choice Quizzes

Part of what drew me to Walden University in the first place was the emphasis on social change.  Thinking about how to help promote positive social change is a part of every course and every dissertation.  On the Walden website, there is a quiz to determine what type of social change agent each person is.  I was required to take this quiz for one of my classes.  I saw it was a multiple choice quiz, which always makes me cringe, because I always seem to want an "other" or fill in the blank type of option.

After taking the quiz, I got the result of a Socially Conscious Consumer.  Here is a link to the six types of social change agents that Walden has classified.  I was kind of surprised by the result, because my social change efforts are not focused on my consumer habits.  Of course I try to be socially conscious at the supermarket and in restaurants.  I'm aware of environmental issues and feel virtuous when I ride my bike instead of driving my car, but my passion for social change is not focused on the environment.  It's focused on people.

Honestly, in looking through the possible classifications, I didn't feel that any really applied to me.  I use social media, but I'm not an avid user of all platforms.  I attend Bible study, but I'm not deeply religious.  I want to do well with my career, but I don't do things in order to make my resume look better.  Social change is deeply important to me, but I promote it on more of a personal level.  As always seems to happen to me, I don't really fit in any of the available categories.

I feel like I need a seventh category of Education Driven change agent.  I believe in being a force multiplier.  If I can help five people do something better, then they can help more people.  As an educator, this means I'm particularly interested in teacher training, but I'm also interested in helping one student at a time.  My ideal job is working as a building specialist where I have the flexibility to work with both adults and students to promote positive change.

The other resource I was required to look at was the website for the New Media Consortium's (NMC's) Horizon Reports.  These are globally researched reports on the futures of various types of educational institutions.  I was drawn to the 2015 K-12 Education report.   When I look at the executive summary that talks about rethinking how schools work and wearable technology, I get excited.  I wonder how they researched these ideas, and I think about how I could disseminate the ideas and get feedback from stakeholders.  This is the kind of social change that gets me out of bed in the morning, because I think education is the starting point for all other types of positive social change.  If we want to improve big things like health care and human rights, we are going to need a well educated populace to enact it.  Educating the world is the key to improving it.

School to Prison Pipeline

I learned a new acronym today, STPP.  It stands for school to prison pipeline, a summary of how the current educational system seems to funnel certain types of students directly to prisons.  I feel simultaneously heartbroken and justified.  Part of the reason I began my PhD journey is because I was working as a middle school reading specialist, and I was worried that I didn't know all I needed to know to help my students.  I am a white female, and the majority of my students were male students of color reading below grade level.  They were frustrated.  Many of them were ready to give up, and I was worried that I didn't have the necessary credentials to get them to stay the course.  I knew that the demographics of the average prison looked very similar to the demographics of my classroom, but I didn't have the statistics to back up the connection between the lack of ability to read on grade level and the probability of ending up in prison.

In February of this year the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) passed a resolution on dismantling the school to prison pipeline.  The resolution cited research that shows correlations between school practices and the likelihood that certain demographics of students will go almost directly from school to prison.  For anyone who has been paying attention to social justice issues over the past decade, this information should not come as a surprise.  The purpose of the resolution is to provide a united front for all stakeholders to work together and find the best ways to address the issue.

After the publication of the resolution, two NCTE blogs were devoted to the topic.  The first one, by Llmarys Caraballo, talked about the shared responsibility of all educational stakeholders in addressing this issue.  She opened with an example of a school administrator who viewed a student's path to prison as inevitable.  Many educators blame students' home environments for both their current educational problems and their future trajectory.  While home factors do play a huge role in students' development, that does not release schools from the responsibility of doing everything in their power to help students find a productive path in life.  It is essential for educational systems and individual teachers to examine the long term impact of their policies.

The second blog, by Jamal Cooks, focused primarily on community support and removal of zero-tolerance policies in schools.  He also pointed out the important role that literacy educators play, which I strongly agree with.

While I will continue to advocate for big picture changes, there are a couple things that teachers can do on a smaller scale that can still have a big impact.  The biggest thing that needs to change is people's attitudes, and so I'm sharing two blogs that each advocate for rethinking how we approach students who are not doing well in school.

The first one, by Rebecca Alber,  talks about students with behavior problems and encourages teachers to be curious, not furious with these kids.  Alber points out that when students misbehave it is usually a call for help.  Teachers should work to create a caring classroom environment where students understand that the focus is on their well-being.  A curious teacher tries to find the underlying issues that create disruptive behavior and seeks to help, rather than simply punish, students.

The second blog, by Andrew Miller, focuses on grading practices and advocates for a do no harm approach to grading.  Again, the focus is on the underlying reason for a student's poor performance, not the punitive power of grades.  Grades are a barometer and a communication device.  They are not meant to be used for punishment.

Fully dismantling the school to prison pipeline will require large scale effort from many stakeholders, but there are lots of small things that any teacher can do to help contribute to this necessary social change.

Getting Boys to Read

One of the things that drives me to become a better literacy teacher is the gender gap in literacy abilities.  You can see it in the U.S. through National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores,

Retrieved from http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_g12_2015/#reading/gaps

and you can see it internationally through Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores.

Retrieved from https://data.oecd.org/pisa/reading-performance-pisa.htm

There has been a lot of attention paid to increasing female achievement in STEM subjects, and I'm fully in favor of that, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere near that level of attention and funding for helping males succeed in reading and other literacy activities.  The math efforts are helping to close the gender gap,

Retrieved from https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm#indicator-chart

so it seems logical that heightened efforts can help close the reading gap as well.  It is especially important to focus on the reading gap, because, unlike the math gap which is at the higher level (ex. fewer girls in advanced math and science classes), the reading gap is largest at the basic proficiency level.  That means that the largest difference is in whether or not male students can effectively read and understand text.  Sure, there are more girls than boys in creative writing electives, and it would be great to get more male voices in there, but what I find truly alarming is the gap in basic literacy skills needed to be a productive citizen.  

I spent several years teaching "remedial" reading classes, and every year my class was disproportionately minority students and disproportionately male.  Obviously racial gaps are important, but why aren't more people talking about the gender gap in reading?  The gender gap feels especially pressing when looking at the PISA data.  This is data from countries all over the world, with all different kinds of racial demographics.  While the math data has a few countries that have closed the gender gap, every single country has a sizable reading gender gap.

So what do we do?  We try to implement strategies that will benefit all learners, but can hopefully reach male students better than current practices.  

In Australia, Jann Carroll approached the problem of getting adolescent boys more engaged in literacy by looking at what they're already engaged in, video games.  Her article describes her work with 27 middle school boys to see how gaming practices can be applied to literacy learning.  What I really appreciate is Carroll's emphasis on literacy as a social activity that has to be relevant in order to be truly engaging.  This matches with what Gregory and Kaufeldt said are the needs of our seeking brains in The Motivated Brain.  They talked about the importance of interaction and play, as well as students' needs for projects and problems that are challenging and require 21st century skills to solve.

Carroll included this table at the end of her article:

These suggestions fit really well with Pink and Deci and Ryan's models that I outlined in my last post.

Ali Carr-Chellman is also concerned about how boys are doing in school and thinks that video games could potentially provide some solutions.  I've included her TED talk below.  I don't necessarily agree with everything she says, but her presentation of the problem is thought provoking.

There's also this fascinating TED talk by Daphne Bavelier on potential positive effects that video games can have on the brain.

I love how she concludes with comparing the brain science to broccoli and the entertainment of video games to chocolate.  She points out that no one wants to eat chocolate covered broccoli.  The current challenge is designing a game that is the equivalent of brownies with pureed vegetables in them, so that they taste awesome but are still good for you.  I'm not completely sold yet, but I think it's an interesting path forward.

A Motivated Brain

Membership in ASCD has many perks.  My favorite perk is having access to Educational Leadership, but I also appreciate that membership means receiving promotional ASCD member books.  Recently, I got a copy of The Motivated Brain: Improving Student Attention, Engagement, and Perseverance.

This book basically has all my favorite words in the title.  Since I have no free time, I'm making slow progress in it, but so far I'm nodding as I'm reading.  Part of the book's initial set up is an argument I've heard before, namely, that it's ridiculous for decisions about the structure and content of education to be made without reference to what works for the human brain.  One of my favorite quick overviews of how our education system is mired in an obsolete model is the RSA Animate version of Ken Robinson's talk on changing education paradigms.  Robinson points out that our current education system is still stuck in the original industrial age paradigm that was in place at the beginning of wide spread public education.  Doing things a certain way because that's the way we've always done it is not only a poor rationale, but it's also a path to failure in this rapidly changing world.

One of the educational changes I would love to see is a greater emphasis on motivating students.  Another great RSA Animate is one by Daniel Pink summarizing some of his major points on what does and does not motivate workers.  Pink focuses on three components that a workplace should provide in order to get successful results from employees: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Pink's three points correlate well with Deci and Ryan's educational psychology based self-determination theory which discusses the basic human need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.  The best part about self-determination theory, or SDT as it's often abbreviated, is that it has been tested in real classroom situations with consistent confirmation of its validity as a model.

Both Pink's model and Ryan and Deci's model emphasize the importance of autonomy.  Ryan and Deci even describe autonomous motivation in contrast to controlled motivation.  I still have to read some more to figure out how this fits with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  I'm realizing that in order to effectively research motivation it will be important to make sure I'm really clear on my terms.  

The first chapter of The Motivated Brain gives an overview of many of the top theories and works related to motivation.  In skimming it, I saw a heading for emotional intelligence, another big buzzword.  The picture next to it shows arrows between the rational and emotional sides of the brain, implying that emotional intelligence is what connects the two.  Thanks to my good friends at RSA Animate I know that the brain's division of duties isn't as simple as we are sometimes lead to believe. 

 

I'm looking forward to reading the next chapter of the book and seeing what I learn.  Please feel free to share any resources you think would help me better understand the brain and motivation.  In case you didn't already figure it out, I especially like explanations with visuals :-)

Does It Help or Hurt?

I just finished reading an interesting Edutopia post by Nell Duke entitled "What Doesn't Work: Literacy Practices We Should Abandon."  She focused on five teaching practices that are not proven to help with long term literacy.  Some of them I agreed with without a second thought, for example, banning weekly spelling lists.  I still remember weekly spelling lists with a shudder.  Memorizing words in isolation was always painful for me, and I was a horrible speller until I started writing things I cared about for an audience I respected.

Another literacy practice that drives me nuts is giving students a list of words and telling them to look them up in the dictionary.  I was glad to see this on the abandon list, but I wish she had delved a little further into why this is such a useless exercise.  When is the last time you looked a word up in the dictionary?  I teach a unit on dictionary skills, and I have yet to come across a word that has only one definition.  Many words have widely different definitions depending on the context in which they are used.  Giving a student a list of words and a dictionary is setting that student up for failure.  It's the worst kind of lazy teaching.  That said, I do pre-teach vocabulary, but I usually make a matching game where I've prepared for the lesson by creating age and context appropriate definitions for the students to match with the vocabulary words.  The students will also see those words in the context of their reading and be able to use them in their own writing.  The words are relevant to the task at hand.

Taking away recess as a punishment is also on the list.  My army veteran husband would laugh at this one.  He's a firm believer that punishment should involve MORE physical activity, not less.  You couldn't sit still during class? Do some sit ups.  Still having trouble behaving? Add some push ups.  Duke's article is aimed more at elementary school teachers, but there is no age at which sitting still for six hours is acceptable.  I'm an adult who couldn't last in an office job, because I couldn't sit at a desk all day.  Who am I to judge a kid who can't sit still and be quiet?

I had no hesitations in endorsing Duke's views on abandoning weekly spelling lists, sending students to the dictionary with no context, and taking away recess as a punishment, but the last two literacy practices on the abandon list hit a little closer to home.  Duke called for removing prizes for reading.  I agree with her, and I like how she emphasized spending time talking about reading, rather than just giving unrelated prizes such as stickers.  There is a wealth of research on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation.  In fact, that's what I want to do my research on.  So while I agree that stickers aren't really helpful in fostering life long readers, it's important to give teachers lots of constructive suggestions of what to put in place of those types of prizes to help keep students' momentum going.

The final item on Duke's naughty list was unsupported independent reading.  Again this one gave me some pause, because sometimes kids just need time to READ, but I agree that this only works if students have some key things in place before and after they read.  Students need to know how to pick a good book, and they need people to talk to about the book.  I think it's okay to have programs like DEAR (Drop Everything and Read), but the teachers implementing these programs need to know what the larger reading plan is.

Overall, Duke's article was a quick read that helped me clarify some of my own thoughts on helpful and hurtful literacy practices.