S. Pike Hall: EdSped

Teaching: Your Thing

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:33:11 GMT

Summary: My move into teaching was propelled by my first reading of Martin Buber[base ']s I and Thou .

One core, resonant idea at the center: our transactions with others glow with moral purpose. Buber notes that if we treat others as an instruments in our own, self-centered life plan, we are [OE]it[base ']-ing those others, reducing each into a set of qualities that are valued only as far as they help in our own life plan, like puppets in a Punch and Judy play. Buber offered a deeply argued other approach.

There is, he suggests, also the possibility of Thou-ing another. Addressing that other in her or his fullness now and in the future, in both actuality and potentiality. This meant to me that my approach to another should respect her or his wholeness, her or his integrity as now seen and as envisioned in the future.

This meant that a great act of teaching would bring a person[base ']s understanding and actions in better alignment with the translation of actuality, what is at every level, and potentiality, what could be.

What a [base "]Thou[per thou]-based teaching relationship would not be:

simply being nice, ie wooing or by other means making the other person comfortable
teaching elements of a common curriculum or of [OE]cultural literacy[base '] for their own sakes (as opposed to as incidental to a thou-centred plan for becoming or enablement)
comfortable, necessarily. What I am, most fundamentally and now is not necessarily accessible to me. What future versions of me that might be best interpretations of the core [base "]me[per thou] might, at this present moment, be incomprehensible, strange, even repellent to me.

I conclude by saying that I believed then, as a 22 year old, and as I do now, more than forty years later, that helping others become what they have the will and potentiality to become is a great and good thing. It gave me goose bumps to think of the possibilities -- still does!!

I still think that this pursuit is a noble calling, a great quest. Noble because difficult and challenging. Noble because Thou-based. Noble because, if successful, it yields great works of living human art, one miracle at a time. It[base ']s a quest because the goal is not always realized and because the fulfillment is the journey as much as it is the destination.

Oh. Last thought: the sign on my teaching shop was going to be the title of this entry. Teaching: Your Thing.

One of my first jobs, I realized, way back then, would be to figure out what on earth that meant!

Weblogged Learning, Weblogged Teaching

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:27:21 GMT

Summary: The resources abound for technically inclined teachers and motivated and technically inclined learners.

The picture makes sense when you've read the Jan 25 entry on Bee-Coming A Webhead. It's all really happening.

Michael Coghlan is now presenting Hearing Online Voices in EFL/ESL on Yahoo Messenger for the BaW 06 Evo Session. 30 people present, among whom 3 Brazilians (Carla Arena, Erika Cruvinel from Brasilia and myself in Sao Paulo). Aiden is explaining how she participated in an audio exchange with Michael and how the students became the main protagonists in the chat. Michael describes how Chris Jones (Arizona), Anne Fox (Denmark) conducted exchanges online with their classes. Buthaina (Kuwait) had webheads listen to students' oral presentations and ask questions. Aiden and Michael have recorded wonderful messages for my blogging workshop on the Summer School Podomatic.

It's almost to the point where people are "taking it for granted". Scary -- cause we still have to pay attention to whether we are teaching!!

[technorati: weblogging, edublogging, onlinelearning]

What to Teach--A little harder now (Bill Wong* Part III)

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:06:43 GMT

Summary: Bill Wong's parents and I mull over what Bill should learn next. I've just finished a conference with the teacher. Now we explore the same topic with Bill's parents.

This entry and the one which will follow will focus on parental and individual takes on exactly the same profile of skills.]

* A reminder: Bill Wong is a hypothetical person. His profile does represent, however, the very real complexity that each person, each learner brings to the discussion of what to learn/what to teach.

Now, instead of discussing the results with principal and superintendent or Bill's teacher, I work with Bill's parents to think about Bill's test results. What do they think should be taught?
Mr. and Mrs. Wong have requested a review of Bill's test results. They want to plan his middle school and high school education. As we sit down they both glance at their copy of Bill's Profile of test results (A copy just above ).
Mr.Wong: Is this some kind of report card or something? We called for this meeting to talk about Bill's future.	Spike Hall: It's Bill's Achievement Profile. I've taken all of his achievement test results and summarized them in this graph. This graph can really help us think about Bill's future.
Mr. W makes sure his copy is the same as mine and then notes, " It's pretty complicated , I see that, but I don't see any of the courses he's signed up for on the chart!. What's it have to do with what we're meetings for -- And what're the vertical lines about and the colored dots and so on. (Mrs. W nods in agreement.)	Spike Hall: Ok. Each vertical line is an area of development. For example, gross motor development translates into, say, athletics. Each vertical line is, like gross motor (athletics), an area of important development that starts with what you and I and Bill -- everybody-- generally bring into our first days in a school and ends with what some of us master in our late teens. Generally speaking, roughly one hundred things, things that need to be learned pretty much in order, are, presented during each year of school. Of course there are individual differences and school to school differences in how much is presented and how much is learned.
Mrs. W asks, "Are those differences important?" Oh -- and what is that horizontal line across the graph. Is that important? I see some of his dots, five, are above the line and a couple are a little bit below?	Spike Hall: That's an important question Mrs. W. That line represents what other boys and girls of Bill's age are capable of doing -- on the average. You can see --
Mr. W interrupts to say: Fine Motor, Gross Motor, Math and Ethics are the ones that are obviously above and Receptive Language and Expressive Language are below. What does all of that mean?	In everyday speak? Bill's capable of reading and writing and speaking but, at least on tests and during observations, he comes up a shade under the class average in those skills. But in athletics, in penmanship and in drawing and in knowing and sharing what he considers right and wrong he is outstanding. Sometimes his skills in communication -- or his reluctance to communicate--, I'm not sure which -- your experience at home may help clear up that mystery -- get in the way of his communicating that strong sense of right and wrong and of justice. Even with communications skills exactly as they are he's clearly a leader, a leader for the good, in my opinion, in these areas.
Mr. W: So he's high in some areas and low in others. Are we supposed to do something because of that?	Spike Hall: I'd say yes! All of us should build from this profile-- at home and at school-- to construct what all of us, Bill most of all, would consider a desirable, doable set of possibilitiees. We can, I believe, build from Bill's high skills (and high interests) in his schooling to help him grow in all his areas. Now that we have this information, we can use it to tailor how we advise Bill on activities and how we encourage him to take on new projects and to set goals. In other words, with this material in hand you and I and Bill can all make life more challenging and more interesting to Bill. At the same time, we can help him see how other areas (math, for example) can support the growth areas that he really does like.
Mr. W: Makes sense so far. But we need to talk over the results with Bill. It's ok, right? (Hall nods emphatically). He's never seen this kind of thing before.	Spike Hall: Makes sense. Then maybe we can have a follow up with all of us and Bill putting together a plan or outline that builds upon Bill's interests and strengths to take him farther on the path he seems to be on.
Mr. W: Hold it. What if he changes his mind three years from now? What if he wants to, all of a sudden, focus on, say, poetry -- which is not interesting to him now.	Spike Hall: That would be his choice. The idea isn't to make him a slave to his best skills or his least skills. Rather-- it is to have his skills work for him and for his evolving life interests (and your backing for them). The idea is for him and you be in the driver's seat when it comes to building his future. When he has the inclination to shift his priorities our job isn't to stop him or to say, blindly, "Go for it!". Our job, at least as far as I see it, is to help him learn and to help him project the consequences of his actions and plans into the future . We would weigh those future consequences against his needs and our greater experience and report our "findings" to Bill. As he gets older and more "in command" our reports become more and more advisory -- a back-up resource to his own evolving command of his future prospects.
Mr. W: Sounds good. Mrs Wong: Good but work too!! Hmm!! But nothing we wouldn't be doing anyway. This is the first time I remember thinking that school and home we're obviously working for the same thing.	Spike Hall: Nice to hear you say that Mrs. W. Yes it will be work and much communication for all of us. I'll look forward to hearing from you two and Bill after you've had your talk about these results and what they mean. Let me know If I can help as you and Bill get into thinking about his growth plan. However your discussions turn out, it would probably a good idea for all of us to get together in the next 2-3 weeks. Next time your house? I'm really looking forward to our next discussion!!

Five minutes later Mr. and Mrs. Wong' and Hall exit the school building on their way to their cars. As Mr and Mrs. drive away Hall waves and smiles. They're too busy talking to notice! He nods his head, smiles and gets into his own car.

Forced Schooling, NO, Small Neighborhood Schools, YES. (JT Gatto again)

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 03:11:24 GMT

Summary: I have written admiringly of John Taylor Gatto before. I am provoked to do so again by Mike Kilen's moving summary and critique of mandatory schooling (aka the factory model of education). There are large dangers to 'factorified' education; the worst, IMHO, is each student's loss of relationship to her or his potential. What's left? The sole decision: as to how much one commits to, or resists, becoming an "appropriately trained" worker participant in a one-size-fits-all vision of existence .

To quote Gatto (via Mike Kilen in today's Des Moines Register):

"To raise kids to get a job rather than find a way to be useful in the world[italics mine*, SPH] is an act of murder," Gatto said.
"In a perfect world, he would close all government schools, use the money to pay parents or other experts to teach kids and sponsor apprenticeships."
"It's not going to happen although a growing number are taking education into their own hands by home schooling.[sigma]
[sigma]So Gatto would start by taking the profit out of teaching kids the relatively easy tasks of reading and arithmetic. He'd eliminate the administrators and school boards. He'd have small, neighborhood schools and measure performance by individualized instruments while teaching themes instead of subjects. He would allow flexible time and space for students to think critically and perform creatively, all within a framework of core values of work, duty, obligation, loyalty, service and fun.

*I'd rephrase more explicitly to say, "find a way to become a satisfactory version of one's vision of one's unique self and at the same time be useful (i.e, contributing to the ongoing project of righteous survival for the immediate and extended community )

Links:

Gatto's web site
His acclaimed and Insightful The Underground History of American Education
An audio clip from "The Paradox of Extended Childhood"
His link to World Prosperity - " A group that is dedicated to defining the root causes of social dysfunction, the most fundamental of which is a dysfunctional educational system."

What to Teach--A little harder now (Bill Wong* Part III)

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 20:59:37 GMT

Summary: Bill Wong's parents and I mull over what Bill should learn next. We've just finished a conference with the teacher. Now we explore the same topic with Bill's parents.

The parental take on the "short and sweet" is probably neither short nor particularly sweet to any of the others involved in the question of what and how to teach.

[See my earlier entries in the What to Teach sequence of entries, First entry here , and the second here . This entry and the one which will follow will focus on parental and individual takes on exactly the same profile of skills.
* A reminder: Bill Wong is a hypothetical person. His profile does represent, however, the very real complexity that each person, each learner brings to the discussion of what to learn/what to teach.

Now Bill's Parents and I process Bill's Results. What do they think should be taught?
Mr. and Mrs. Wong have requested a review of Bill's test results. They want to plan his middle school and high school education. As we sit down they both glance at their copy of Bill's Profile of test results(Copy just above )
Mr.Wong: Is this some kind of report card or something? We called for this meeting to talk about Bill's future.	Spike Hall: It's Bill's Achievement Profile. I've taken all of his achievement test results and summarized them in this form. This form or graph can really help us think about Bill's future.
Mr. W makes sure his copy is the same as mine and then notees, " It's pretty complicated , I see that, but I don't see any of the courses he's signed up for on the chart!. What's it have to do with what we're meetings for -- And what're the vertical lines about and the colored dots and so on. Mrs. W nods in agreement.	Spike Hall: Ok. Each vertical line is an area of development. For example, gross motor development translates into, say, athletics. Each vertical line is an, like athletics, area of important development that starts with what you and I and Bill -- everybody-- generally bring into our first days a Kindergarten class and ends with what most of us master in our late teens. Generally speaking, roughly one hundred things, things that need to be learned pretty much in order, are, learned each year of school. Of course there are individual differences and school to school differences.
Mrs. W asks, "Are those differences important?" Oh -- and what is that horizontal line across the graph. Is that important? I see some of his dots, five, are above the line and a couple are a little bit below?	Spike Hall: That's an important question Mrs. W. That line represents what other boys and girls of Bill's age are capable of doing -- on the average. You can see --
Mr. W interrupts to say: Fine Motor, Gross Motor, Math and Ethics are the ones that are obviously above and Receptive Language and Expressive Language are below. What does all of that mean.	In everyday speak? Bill's capable of reading and writing and speaking but, at least on tests and during observations, he comes up a shade under the class average in those skills. But in athletics, in penmanship and in drawing and in knowing and sharing what he considers right and wrong he is outstanding. Sometimes his skills in communication -- or reluctance, I'm not sure, your experience at home may help clear up that mystery -- get in the way of his strong sense of right and wrong and of justice. But he's clearly a leader, a leader for the good, in my opinion, in these areas.
Mr. W: So he's high in some areas and low in others. Are we supposed to do something because of that?	Spike Hall: I'd say yes! We build on this at home and at school. We can, I believe, be pretty darn active in involving Bill's high skills (and high interests) in his schooling and in helping him bring enhance the other skills to support his strong areas. I believe that, now that we have this information, we can use it to tailor how we advise Bill on activities and how we encourage him to take on new projects and to set goals. In other words, with this material in hand you and I and Bill can all make life more challenging and more interesting to Bill. At the same time, we can help him see how other areas (math for example) can support the growth areas that he really does like and with which he has such considerable skill.
Mr. W: Makes sense so far. But we need to talk over the results with Bill. It's ok, right? (Hall nods emphatically). He's never seen this kind of thing before.	Spike Hall: Makes sense. Then maybe we can have a follow up with all of us and Bill putting together a plan or outline that builds upon Bill's interests and strengths to take him farther on the path he seems to be on.
Mr. W: Hold it. What if he changes his mind three years from now? What if he wants to, all of a sudden, focus on, say, poetry -- which is not interesting to him now.	Spike Hall: That would be his choice. The idea isn't to make him a slave to his best skills or his least skills. Rather-- it is to have his skills work for him and for his life interests (and your backing for them) be in the driver's seat rather than some anonymous and bureaucratic textbook series. When he has the inclination to shift his priorities our job isn't to stop him or to say, blindly, "Go for it!". Our job, at least as far as I see it, is to help him learn and to help him project the consequences of his actions and plans into the future -- and to weigh those consequences against his needs and our greater experience.
Mr. W: Sounds good. Mrs Wong: Good but work too. But nothing we wouldn't be doing anyway. This is the first time I remember thinking that school and home we're obviously working for the same thing.	Spike Hall: Nice to hear you say that Mrs. W. I'll look forward to hearing from you two and Bill after you've had your first talk. If I can help interpret or back up interpretation at school with Bill in class let me know. Then we'll all get together in the next 2-3 weeks. I appreciate your coming over and your kind comments so much!!

The Wong's and Hall exit school building on way to cars. Mr and Mrs. drive away having an animated conversation. Hall waves and smiles. They're too busy to notice!

Bill Wong: Part I (Getting Started with "What to Teach")

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 18:31:47 GMT

Summary: Real Person and I talk about the Meaning of Life and Learning For Bill Wong. RP and I begin to talk about developmental profiling in general and as it would benefit instruction in the classroom (in RP's case a High School classroom). (This will be the first of a series of entries on how classroom activity and the learner's cutting edge can or should relate to each other.)

We Talk about Bill, Potential and Real Life.
RP and I are sitting in my office after he's had a rough and demanding day in his High School History Classroom. We're planning later classes in his Masters program. As we are just finishing up our planning he looks over at this chart that's been sitting next to his papers. (Copy just above )
RP: Whatya got there, some kind of graph. I remember you showing us progress graphs in the assessment class.	Spike Hall: It's Bill's Achievement Profile. I've taken all of his achievement test results and summarized them in this form.
RP moves to my side of the table so he can see it better. So what're the vertical lines about and the colored dots on them.	Spike Hall: Ok. Each vertical line is an area of development that starts with what kids generally bring into the beginning of a Kindergarten class and ends with what the best kids master in their late teens. All in all, roughly one hundred things, things that need to be learned pretty much in order, are supposed to be learned each year in each area.
RP squirms a bit, picks up the chart and reads labels, rotates chart first vertically then horizontally
RP: Okay, I get the basic idea, sort of. What are each of the areas?	Spike Hall: GK: General Knowledge. That which is frequently a major component of so-called IQ tests. Material that should make sense on news shows, that comes up in the newspaper, how everyday things work, safety, history, that sort of thing. RL: Receptive Language. Reading, Listening and Signing recognition are examples. In general, receptive language involves: The ability to process incoming language. This requires ability to receive some signal (as examples the word "dog" as said by another, "dog" as signed by another or the word "dog" on the printed page). This ability requires a set of "words" that are recognizable by the individual. The ability to process complex linguistic messages requires memory and grammatical decoding skills as well. EL: Expressive Language. Writing, Speaking and Signing are examples. In general, expressive language involves: The ability to process an outgoing message. This requires the formulation of an intent, the translation of that intent into a set of semantic items, the grammatic connection of those items into a message and the generation of signals appropriate to those grammatically connected items The ability to process complex linguistic messages requires short-term memory as well as the skills already mentioned. FM: Fine Motor. Fine motor skills: The ability to coordinate hand in small spaces to accomplish such things as handwriting, carving, puzzle assembly, knitting, sewing, etc. Usually aided by senses of sight and touch GM: Gross Motor. The movement of the body in space as in walking, running, tumbling, gymnastics, swimming. Athletics of competitive and noncompetitive forms generally involve the demonstration of skilled gross motor skills. Dancing involves the above plus the ability to move as influenced by the rhythm and even mood of music. ML: Math and Logic. Perception of, reasoning and communication about amount, amount and space(as in geometry and trigonometry) and logical relations as they have bearing on various understandings concerning everyday and professional existence. Soc: Social Skills. Ability to respond to and send messages which are socially effective in the context. This would include manners, perception of emotions, expressing emotions effectively, leading, following, cooperating, negotiating. E: Ethics, Ethical Skills. The ability to perceive the application of moral and ethical principles to practical and general situations involving individual, small and large group behavior. The ability to not only perceive but to influence the ethical practices of others would combine both social and ethical domains.
RP has become increasingly agitated while all of this explanation has taken place. His foot is tapping and his face is a little redder than it was a few minutes ago.
RP: [Splutter, cough … ]. I'm having trouble getting behind this project--- connecting it to what I do, which is teach History to kids who start out having no use for it and too often end up the same way. I have attendance problems, I have a Department head who thinks videotapes and DVDs 75% of the time are the answer. Help me make the connections Spike -- I'm not seeing them!	Spike Hall: Okay. Let's start with a premise, namely, that each student will learn well and easily if instructional material, content and process are at or near her or his "readiness level", also that it will not go wellor easily if the material is too far below or above "readiness level". Look now at Bill, particularly at his "profile". What do you see?
RP: Well, for one, his profile has hills and valleys. The hills, I suppose, represent strength and the valley's weakness. Right?	Spike Hall: Close enough but with some qualifications. First, it will depend on how you define strength. If one defines strength as "power" with a material (say social skills) that is greater than that one one's peers. Then yes. But it will depend on the individual. The goal-directed won't be so pleased or sense themselves so powerful if even a relative social strength in social skills or logic or whatever isn't sufficient to realize self-set goals. But, yes, let's talk of strength as defined by one's power relative to one's peers. How does Bill measure up in that sense?
RP: Well I wouldn't know about Bill except with reference to himself-- that is how many objectives out of the total K-13 set he has mastered. In some areas more than others. Those are self- and sequence- related strengths right?	Spike Hall: Right. That's the way I see it too. But we also have that funny dashed line going across the chart. That represents the average that is expected of people who are the same age.
RP: That would allow us to compare him to the "norm". Ok, I get it and on that basis he's quite strong in in Fine Motor and Gross Motor skills, and really good with Ethics; and more or less average in other areas.	Spike Hall: Do you see any implications from this pattern of average to terrific in various skill areas?
RP: Maybe. Hmm. Maybe the Ethics would be useful as we look at political history or social dynamics or the conduct of school board and city council meetings, etc.	Spike Hall: I agree. But it isn't just benefit to the class. It's benefit to him. If you ask things of him and instruct him in a way that respects and interacts with his present skills and beliefs you will be more likely to help him make significant growth. It doesn't have to be a totally different curriculum to do that. You can still have the American History textbook play a significant part. But how you use it can be adjusted to skills, values and profiles, to the benefit, and learning pleasure, of all.
Rowanda F., fellow faculty member and advisor to RP, drops by and is invited to sit down. She listens a bit while looking over the Bill W chart. She gets an intensity of look and is clearly about to say something. Spike and RP look expectantly in her direction. Rowanda: You two are obviously onto something hot and, as much as I've been able to gather getting here late, it seems really worthwhile. But - hey --I'm concerned about something too. Where is it that Bill's aims, ambitions and concerns are folded in? [Rowanda continues] One of the most powerful forces for success in Bill's (and any other student's] program has to be what s/he wants, what s/he will commit to, what goals are driving actions right now. Even if we keep the subject matter organization, this really should be questioned, but even if we did, we have to have Bill sitting in the driver's seat and with us as advisors. This chart will give Bill insight, us too. But it shouldn't call the tune. It's not that Bill is low in X and high in Y that is important. What is centrally important is what Bill wants to do now and what he wants to become. The fact that he is high in Fine Motor skills and Ethics may inspire choices of goals or methods... but shouldn't BECOME the goals. [Rowanda concludes] Finally I don't see one assessment that I think is central if Bill is going to be in the driver's seat (and he should be). It has been called metalearning and deuterolearning -- but basically is how good he is at learning to learn. Having an understanding of how well he independently or with guidance learns to learn any given subject (for example the general subjects on this chart) is insight Bill needs as he tries simultaneously to find out who he is, what he wants and what he might be good at. [Rowanda exits] Sorry guys to introduce the subject and then exit but have an appointment for which I'm already 10 minutes late.
RP: Wow that's too much too fast but I think I've been swayed!!! At the same time I don't really know what this chart or expanded one Rawanda is referring to has to do with how I run my History class. More on that later.	Spike Hall: [laughing] She's always like that. Frays the nerves, at least in my case, but there's lots to be had by replaying what she says. In this case I've got two things to start with. The first one is that Bill has to be at the center. These test results are for Bill's guidance as he makes decisions; we are informational and planning resources, but it's his plan!! This is a far more radical idea either of us might realize. The second is the whole idea of learning to learn. If you accept the idea of Bill's being in charge of his learning -- and he is,ultimately, however much we insist on control of our classroom or class processes, then knowing just what his l-to-l skill in each area is important as he chooses what to do. Finally, he should probably understand how good he is at this central skill and what he can do about it. My mind is tired. Let's quit for now.
RP and Spike agree to let it go for the day. RP wants specifics and Spike promises to describe possible uses and classroom actions that are tuned more exactly to RP's history classroom.

[Stay tuned for further interactions. Bill Wong: Part II.]

Organization of Communication in a Classroom

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:26:00 GMT

Summary: Readiness theory would have us predict that learning will be real and non-trival to the extent that what is being taught about and how it is taught matches the content and learning strategies already "owned" by the learner. It seems that the education profession is quite comfortable with this as a general statement; however, the useful application of this maxim in classroom situations, i.e., something that results in improved student learning, is appallingly small . Class lectures and/or reading one chapter at a time from a text, as representative examples of current practices, are not good ways to maximize student learning. In this entry I offer one basis for understanding why this is so and then I sketch several ideas for making the ideal into the real.

Moving to Personalization from Large Group Instruction is a BIG Deal:

Assume that you have the objective sequences, tests, and instructional activities for several content areas planned; that map is lying in front of you. If you are teaching in an elementary school as a classroom teacher, you may have to teach each of thirty pupils in each of these content areas. If you are a secondary or adult-level teacher working in a typical situation, you may have as many as two or three content areas to cover for perhaps ninety to one hundred and fifty students.

Let's look at the elementary classroom. In that classroom, as stated before, you might be responsible for thirty students' progress in five curriculum areas. You would probably be responsible for reading, language arts, arithmetic, social studies, and science. As is illustrated in the first table, your personalization problems would be considerable. In these five areas you could, if each student had different objectives from all of the others in that area, have responsibility for personalizing in a classroom with instruction required for 150 (5 areas x 30 students) objectives.

Thankfully, since there are usually several objectives which are needed for more than one student, the required instruction would probably come closer to a distribution like that illustrated in the table below example (where instruction is required for approximately 85 objectives as the year begins ).

In such a situation there is no way that "whole class" lectures alone could be a useful instructional activity for each of the students depicted below (as x’s in the table below) . Even if your lesson was perfect, that lesson could only say the appropriate thing to a small fraction of your students (those who had sufficient skill levels to be able to learn from the concepts that you were using).

The other students might sit still, might even acquire pieces of the information here and there, but would not learn in the sense that you assumed or were hoping for.

The Personalizer's Dilemma
Reading		Language Arts		Arithmetic		Social Studies		Science
Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students
1	--0--	1	--0--	1	--0--	1	--0--	1	--0--
2	--0--	2	--4--	2	--0--	2	--0--	2	--0--
3	--2--	3	--1--	3	--0--	3	--5--	3	--2--
4	--1--	4	--1--	4	--0--	4	--5--	4	--3--
5	--1--	5	--1--	5	--0--	5	--3--	5	--3--
6	--1--	6	--1--	6	--2--	6	--1--	6	--1--
7	--1--	7	--0--	7	--3--	7	--1--	7	--1--
8	--2--	8	--0--	8	--1--	8	--0--	8	--4--
9	--2--	9	--0--	9	--1--	9	--1--	9	--1--
10	--3--	10	--1--	10	--1--	10	--1--	10	--1--
11	--3--	11	--1--	11	--1--	11	--3--	11	--1--
12	--0--	12	--1--	12	--1--	12	--1--	12	--1--
13	--1--	13	--1--	13	--0--	13	--1--	13	--1--
14	--1--	14	--1--	14	--3--	14	--0--	14	--0--
15	--4--	15	--1--	15	--2--	15	--0--	15	--0--
16	--4--	16	--1--	16	--1--	16	--0--	16	--0--
17	--1--	17	--1--	17	--1--	17	--1--	17	--0--
18	--0--	18	--1--	18	--1--	18	--1--	18	--0--
19	--1--	19	--1--	19	--1--	19	--0--	19	--0--
20	--0--	20	--0--	20	--1--	20	--1--	20	--0--
21	--1--	21	--3--	21	--1--	21	--1--	21	--1--
22	--0--	22	--3--	22	--1--	22	--3--	22	--1--
23	--1--	23	--3--	23	--3--	23	--0--	23	--1--
24	--0--	24	--0--	24	--3--	24	--0--	24	--1--
25	--0--	25	--1--	25	--1--	25	--0--	25	--1--
26	--0--	26	--0--	26	--0--	26	--0--	26	--1--
27	--1--	27	--2--	27	--0--	27	--0--	27	--1--
28	--1--	28	--0--	28	--0--	28	--0--	28	--0--
29	--1--	29	--0--	29	--1--	29	--0--	29	--0--

You can probably see that this same sort of reasoning applies to any secondary or college classroom situation that you might describe. While there might be fewer subjects taught during the day, there would be more students. The likelihood of one textbook page or one lecture being appropriate for all students is virtually zero. The difficulty of managing the delivery of personalized instruction is at least as difficult for the secondary or college teacher as it is for the elementary teacher. And , if maximizing the rate of student mastery of (not exposure to) material is the goal , it is equally crucial to the success or failure of the secondary and college enterprise

Organizational Assumptions

Normally, we interact with people spontaneously, and in a 1, 2, 3, 4 at a time fashion. However, teaching and personalization are not "normal" relationships. The relationship in each is purposeful and planned. Personalization, when it occurs, requires the simultaneous distribution of a teacher's purposes, plans, and interactions among thirty people, at maximum; and at minimum (as in the reading example in Table 1), among four to six individuals or clusters of individuals.

In order to have the maximum impact upon all thirty individuals in a classroom, there has to be a radically different organization to instructional activities than there would be, say, to a conversation.

Each personalizer has many forces with which he or she must deal in order to personalize. All of those forces mandate high organization in order to accomplish individually prescribed instructional objectives. A list of these forces is given in the following table.

Personalization Factors and Necessary Organized Responses
Assumption #	Factors	Necessary Organized Response
1	Students enter any sequence of instructional objectives with varied mastery	Different lessons need to be taught to different students at the same time.
2	Students have different perceptual requirements for learning.	Instruction on each objective must be offered using more than one perceptual modality.
3	Students have different physical/social needs for optimal learning.	Instruction will need to be offered in varied physical/social settings simultaneously. For example, a small group and an individual study option might both be available for Objective 26 in the science sequence.
4	Students require distinct motivational strategies. Reinforcers for the varied subjects will vary from student to student.	Teacher will have to arrange the instructional environment so that varying motivational strategies (e.g., points with one, grades with another, praise with another, etc.) may be used simultaneously.
5	Students will finish the same instructional activity at different rates.	For 5, 6, 7: The teacher will need to develop and maintain procedures which allow her/him to be sensitive to the failure or success of instruction (7).
6	Students will require varying numbers of instructional activities in order to achieve mastery of the same objective.	These activities will need to be usable at any time (5,6).
7	Initial plans for motivational and instructional activities will need repair as patterns of student response show where plans need improvement . Also, even the best designs will need some modification a as the times alter what students commonly experience.	The teacher will need to periodically revise instructional and motivational activities.
8	The teacher will not know the answer to all problems that show themselves.	Each instructional unit,. i.e., department, building, learning team, the school as a whole, etc., whatever else it does, will have to provide problem-solving material and support to teachers in order that best solutions to problems.

With these factors in mind, you can see that personalization requires a high level of classroom organization. It follows that a lecture format does not allow personalization and thus is not productive in terms of student learning. Implementing a high/middle/low grouping plan will allow finer tuning of instructional delivery. Everything else held constant this will enhance average learning of objectives per week but will be far short of what is possible.

The cause of personalization will be advanced considerably by moving the teacher out of the role of a bottleneck in the flow of instructional information and organizational and operational communication (One thing about large group lecture, choral recitation and all doing the same thing—fewer decisions for the teacher . When the teacher organizes the personalized classroom s/he is building in a necessity for many more moment to moment decisions. Why? Because decisions are no longer the same for all nor do they occur at the same time. Thus the need for careful planning and organization in the personalized classroom. The bottleneck is found when every or most instructional messages and organizational decisions must be created on-the-fly by the teacher. When the bottleneck exists the classroom pace grinds down to a snails pace within moments of the beginning of class.

On the other hand, if the volume of decisions is planned for, these decisions are anticipated and thus built into the structure and processes of the classroom. Class members act independently as signaled by place, circumstance or time. Once these signals are planned and then learned and practiced, the multiple organizational and instructional decisions will be carried out independently by members of the class. During class hours the teacher spends time on planned instructional delivery and on individual learning concerns that have not been built into the carefully designed personalized learning environment.

By having much of the organizational decision-making and instructional communication capable of occurring independently of here-and-now teacher action we eliminate the bottleneck. All students will have access to the instructional communication and organizational decisions that they need. Thirsty people will get to drink when they need it, or, in ‘instructionese’, each person will get the lesson that is appropriate to her or his level of readiness.

Teaching a System as Well as Subject Matter:

Your major trick will be to set up an instructional system that eliminates the bottleneck, and to teach students to use it. In such a system, you would reserve for yourself those instructional communications and organizational decisions that could not be made by students or materials. Naturally, the fewer of these on-the-fly the less likely there will be bottlenecking.

Components of Your Organizational System

The major idea of your system is the division of the total activities of the class into subactivities which are carried out at centers. For example, the centers might be as follows:

direct instruction/individual counseling

tape and filmstrip,

group study,

reading,

individual work,

mastery testing,

daily monitoring of progress in each (orspecially targeted) subjects.

Each center has its organizational rules which govern its use and which are posted for all to see in its location. This particular subdivision of classroom activities is not the only one possible. Subdivisions could be based on subject matter (e.g. science, reading, math, etc.), or topics, such as environment, creativity, etc. in which all basic skills have a part. (For example, the environment center might have required math, reading, writing, and social activities associated with its objectives.)

[Edited for html problems readability 12/1. Also having trouble with MarsEdit and Radio Userland Handshakes]

Needs Assessment: A scenario, given that we have the data

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:22:22 GMT

Untitled Document Summary: It's hard to find a path to educational reform. Using "deficiency scores" on norm-referenced tests is and ineffective approach, even if it's sincerely intended only as a startup catalyst. They just aren't family-, school- or teacher- friendly enough to translate into effective reform. The heat they generate consumes resources while enhancing nothing but the level of distrust of Federal change efforts.

Effective reform must translate directly into classroom change, one child, one objective and one lesson at a time. (And yes, NCLB doesn't work because, while it may generate just criticism, it does not simultaneously generate effective change.) What could fit these "good change effort " specifications is curriculum based testing in multiple developmental areas. The pay off for such a monumental test development and administration effort is that, even if the results do not flatter our present instructional efforts or systems, we will have created a precise "what to teach next" estimate for each individual in each of multiple developmental areas.

One motivator: A local demonstration the reality that individual growth isn't yet touched by what we do now. One approach to such a sketch, cousin to the present dysfunctional consumer of state funds, could take flesh as a statewide assessment of a representative sample of schools. This assessment would actually help has to in two ways that our present mandated system does not: a) it would be curriculum referenced and directly translatable into retargeted, individually tailored instruction, and (b) we would then have a sense of what is possible (from trial teaching and summer teaching) and what is real, right now. We could use these discrepancies to focus our reform efforts.

A piece of such an analysis is sketched and explained below.

I'll illustrate by filling in (hypothetical) results for the sixth grade in the state of Floriana. For this illustration I'm discussing results in 3 of 14 areas of development* from the table of my last entry and interpreting. Pieces of the table with interpretation follow below:

Statewide Measures of Developmental Knowledge: Sixth Grade
Data Timing or Analysis--------> Type of Skill	A Test Begin School Year	B Test End School Year	C Test Begin Next School Year	D School Growth/ Week	E Summer Growth/ Week	F State Annual Growth/ Week	G National Begin Next School Year	H National Annual Growth/ Week
General Cultural Information	660	770	830	2.8	5.0	3.3	1092	2.4
Receptive Communication (Listening, Recognizing Signed Communication, Reading, etc)	902	1092	1110	4.8	1.5	4.0	1010	3.0
Social Interaction (Including Self Control)	1242	1382	1424	3.5	3.5	2.0	800	1.5
Ethical/Moral Understanding and Behavior	1010	1154	1221	3.6	5.6	4.1	600	1.5

In this example I am assuming that 3900 objectives have been carefully and rigorously sequenced as stairways to growth for for any learner. The phrase "carefully and rigorously sequenced" means that if one is tested and found to be ready for objective 29 then s/he has mastered/doesn't need all objectives of lower number and would fail at tests of mastery of objectives of higher number. There are more than enough possibilities in each area for even bright 25 year olds.

Columns A-F report state averages whereas columns G and H report national averages.

Columns A-C and G report report average positions within learning sequence at state and national levels, respectively.

Columns D-F and H report average growth per week at the state and national levels, respectively.

Now that the stage has been set for our mental experiment, what might Floridians note about this data? How might they interpret it. How would these intrepretations affect future actions?

First, let's note column D . It's values are the computed average weekly growth rate during the school months (roughly 36 weeks of school distributed over 40 weeks of the year). We find that in the state of Floriana students master an average of 2.8 objectives of general cultural material, 4.8 objectives having to do with receiving and understanding information that made accessible in books, lecture, television, conversation,etc,3.5 objectives per week having to do with social interaction skills (manners, reading body language, negotiations, games, are examples) and 3.6 objectives per week having to do with moral/ethical behavior (for example, behaving in such a way so as to benefit others and to support, say, social order and what society considers "a good life"). In short, progress is made in the sixth grade; there seems to be markedly less learning in the area of general cultural understanding, however.

Comparing what we've just learned from column D with the information from column E allows us to compare the impact of school with the impact on non-school life as they each affect the growth of sixth graders. This comparison makes it obvious that, in the State of Floriana, non-school has a decidedly stronger impact on growth in all areas but receptive communication. What this means will require further research by Florianan policy makers.

Finally, Florianans will probably want to compare Florianan to National levels of achievement and growth rates.
Levels of achievement: Florianan students are higher in all but general cultural information.
Growth rates: Sixth grade Florianan students have a higher annual growth rate in all areas: for the first three areas growth rate is 25-33% higher. Perhaps most interesting is the growth rate of Florianan students in ethical/moral behavior. It is just short of three times greater than the national average. With a difference this big I suspect that the only surprise will be for an out of state analyst. This will come as no surprise to Florianans once noted. It may well be an indicator of a strong and unique divergence of the Floridian life-style and belief-system from that of the nation as a whole.

However Florinian analysts end up calling the divergence from national norms, the differences between Summer growth rates and School Year growth rates needs understanding. What is it that accelerates the summers (or depresses growth in the school year)? Are there factors in classrooms , curriculum choices, preprofessional or inservice training or supervision that could be altered. However this analysis turns we can check growth rates again next year and determine if our chosen solution was effective. That is, we can check if we adopt and use the criterion-referenced, curriculum-referenced test system that was initially developed to assess the system as a whole.

Don't worry, in the criterion-referenced view, teaching to the objectives is fair and appropriate. Just don't teach memorized answers from a purloined or otherwise copied master test.

Needs Based Assessment of Educational Systems

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 17:26:28 GMT

Summary. This entry takes up where my earlier entry on Needs Based (or Goal Free) Evaluation [at the general level] left off. In this one I've decided to conduct a 'mental experiment' by beginning to describe a needs based evaluation of our schools.

In order to procede with some intellectual order that we'll start with the following definition:

"A student is having educational needs met when:

a) she/he is receiving appropriate instruction for her/his "zone of proximal development" (roughly synonymous with "readiness level" and first articulated by L. Vygotsky);

b) this condition (a above) will be bet in each of 14 distinct areas of development (see below for a list);

c) the conditions indicated in a and b above are also delivered at a rate that is determined by maximum comfortable rate of learning in each area of development for each person.*"

Then we get busy.

For starters: Conduct a needs based (goal free) assessment in one tenth of the school districts of one state. Get pre and post data over one calendar year. Use criterion and curriculum referenced testing in each of 14 areas of human endeavor. Add a sampling at the beginning of summer to enable an estimate ofthe amount and sorts of learning that occur outside of school.

In order to design school improvement efforts we must know what to improve. Thus we will have to profile the benefits (i.e., the learning) presently derived from schools. Such a profile will allow us to portray the rate, breadth and depth of school learning. This information cannot stop with the basics, i.e., 'reading, writing and arithmetic'. We are concerned that our developing citizens are capable of engaging with deeper issues, such as active citizenship, an understanding and care for the natural environment, etc. We are also concerned with development of individual potential wherever it is headed (as long as it is not hostile to or destructive of the general social order). In order to test our present delivery (via home and school interventions) of such a breadth of skills we'll have to test quite broadly. We will also --- in order to be sensitive to rate of learning as an indicator of potential-- we'll also have to be able to determine the degree to which the average rate of learning of such skills is close to optimal (i.e., a sufficient realization of what is possible with "state of the art" instruction).

Statewide Measures of Developmental Knowledge: Sixth Grade
Data Timing or Analysis-------------> Type of Skill	Test at Beginning of School Year (v1**)	Test at End of School Year (v2)	Test At Beginning of Next School Year (v3)	School Year Growth per Week (v4)	Summer Growth Per Week (v5)	Annual Growth Per Week(v6)	National Avg. at Beginning of Next School Year (v7)	National Avg. Growth Per Week (v8)
General Cultural Information
Receptive Communication (Listening, Signing, etc)
Expressive Communication (Speaking, Signing)
Written Expression
Numerical and Logical Understanding
Bodily Coordination
Eye-Hand Coordination
Social Interaction (Including Self Control)
Introspective Knowledge
Ethical/Moral Understanding and Behavior
Musical Appreciation and Expression
Visual and Multidimensional Appreciation and Expression
Mechanical/Scientific Appreciation and Expression
Appreciation and Interaction with Natural (Living and NonLiving) Systems

This would give us a basis for deciding what we would like to do given what we presently [have been proven to] accomplish with our schools.

* This implies that the instructional system will be providing instructional materials, lessons and tests at a pace that is dictated by individual rate of learning as opposed to a fixed schedule. Thus, at any given time, students will be working on different objectives, with different materials, for differing lengths of time. It should be obvious that, while I have stated needs to be, roughly,"to grow as much as possible in areas of activity that are valued by most human societies", this does not overlap with subject coverage in most schools.
** All variables are calculated averages deriving from statewide grade level sampling of actual instruction. Another variable, Potential Annual Growth per Week, could be created through use proven alternative curricula on a cross sectional subsample of students in representative regions of the state . *Edited 10/20/05

Communicating a Vision: In Graduate and Undergraduate Education Classes - In Research as Well

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 00:57:10 GMT

Summary: The number of ways to transmit a motivating vision knows is limited primarily by one's communicative imagination and ingenuity. We know the effective vision by it's effects. It frames and impels specific learning. An effective vision is not limited by the knowledge-making venue; a good vision can work in instructivist, deuterlearning and independent or collaborative research environments.

All of this I said in a recent entry. In this entry I would like to share a specific vision-making classroom activity, one that has turned the heads of 20 year old sophisticates and superintendents with 20 years of experience.

Here are the clients of the simulation activity:

Part of the visioning is the creation of an imaginable reality, as you can see in this case, a group of people working together. A teacher and 6 students. The idea of the picture is to create an imagining, a vessel for memories and analogies to real people rather than "words" and "phrases". These imagined people will draw commitments, concerns, compassion and hope in a way that "individualizing" "personalizing" "maximizing potential", alone, cannot.

Impact on thought comes through a) the acceptance of the assumptions about how things work and the b) consequent psychological transitions which occur when the simulation, with an accepted set of premises, impacts the simulation students as it does. (Class members will generally agree that the 6 member class more-or-less represents the range of skill/character variation within a typical class.)

The following sets up the exercise (which I've typically done in a 1-1.5 hr period) The Ms Fineteach Simulation Experience

(these materials are supplements for the accommodative instruction class discussion)

The purpose of this simulation is to examine curricular and instructional ideas as they interact with each other and as they influence real life situations.

The following are the guiding concepts of this particular simulation:

Rule 1: Kids learn things in sequence. Placing them above or below their readiness level will result in no learning.

Rule 2: Lessons have content aims. If the content aim is within three objectives, up or down, from a studentÕs readiness level, s/he will learn at her/his learning rate (LR). Otherwise s/he will not learn at all. Example: If Howard Hughes is ready for, i.e., has mastered prerequisite skills/ concepts/etc for, objective 27, he will learn at his learning rate. If he learns at a rate of 6 objectives per week (LR=6), he will do that (even if the teacher isn't exposing material that quickly). If he learns at a rate of 2 objectives per week (LR=2), he will learn that many objectives this week, even if the teacher has presented more material than that.

Rule 3: Students will give teachers a two week honeymoon... with only minor-too all intents and purposes, negligible --misbehavior ... for two weeks at the beginning of the school year. This means that what would, under other circumstances, set off misbehavior will not do so during the honeymoon. Good impact of instruction will, however, take place.

Rule 4: For Òoff-taskÓ read 50% of it as quietly off-task (e.g., staring out the window... reading a comic book hidden in the text book, etc.) and read the other 50% as a ÒtroublesomeÓ [disruptive] kind of off-task.

Rule 5: If misbehavior of the ÒtroublesomeÓ variety is between 25% and 50% the teacher is decidedly grumpy; i.e., s/he is less positive, takes more convincing to participate in building planning and development activities [which, in the long-term, makes or breaks a school; change is constant...if teachers don't participate in the structuring of how change impacts their school... then laws are imposed on them... they resent... and feel out of control and unimportant and their cooperation level goes down even further, and so on].

Rule 6: Ms Fineteach aims her reading program so that it covers 3 objectives per week. She starts the present semester and this unit on objective 30. Her method is large-group-oriented: There is an explanation of the activity followed by the activity. There are roughly 6 different and worthwhile multisensory activities which are set up for each objective. She plans for the group to complete the [18] activities having to do with three reading objectives each week. By the end of our 8 week simulation she will have exposed each student to 24 objectives [and 144 activities].

Rule 7: If the average of all students' troublesome behavior averages greater than 50% teacher begins to be decidedly bitter... i.e., waaaay beyond grumpy. Problems are projected onto others. Uncooperative and hostile toward a problem solving orientation. His/her lessons arenÕt as effective. Coverage is reduced from three to 2 objectives per week -which will alter teacher impact on the students who are at the appropriate learning level.

Rule 8a: Impact of nonlearning. With the exception of the honeymoon, when a student does not learn anything during a given week, her/his OT rate (see below) will double in the following week.

Rule 8b: Impact of learning. Any week in which at least one objective is learned will result in a studentÕs cutting her/his OT rate in half during the following week.

A full set up of the experience with worksheet and value/concept probes is provided on an in-class worksheet( which is accessible via this link).

A Vision as An Integrating Guide for Students (and the Teacher).

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 20:40:47 GMT

Summary: Your first job as master teacher is to wake them up. After the last echo of the wake-up call has fallen silent your students will be left with a hunger and a vision. The vision will enlighten each act of specific learning. The vision is necessarily new and the hunger is for its realization.

The vision is a context, a framing, a meaning system within which all of the specific content of your teachings will fit. As with pieces of a jig saw puzzle, each teaching is seen, by the awakened, to be a specific and partial realization of the vision, "big picture". The struggle to acquire the piece that fits just so, or, possibly, the struggle to find any piece that clearly fits anywhere in the design, is driven by the vision of the awakening.

Without the vision your students are reduced to doing what they're told to do, to "behaving" in a teacher-approved way.

(Picture from Tulare county (USA, CA) library online photo archives. As typical as this picture is for its time, I thought it an evocative nonexample of vision-guided individual learning.)

Alright!, you say. I'm going to explain my whole philosophy for the course right at the beginning. That way they'll get the big picture. Sounds good!!

Not really! The creation of an integrating vision is a huge challenge. The vision must leap over the ignorance that the specific teaching that follows is meant to erase. In my own case, for example, I've found that without suffcient care and creativity my previews can be an explanation which is constructed from the yet-to-be-mastered pieces. Appropriate as a review, perhaps, but NOT as a preview, even less as a vision.

Even less? Well yes! You can't construct an explanation from concepts and principles not yet mastered. So that's mistake one. But, because the vision has two jobs, there's yet another problem. The other, deeper, problem is that a set of terms does not equal a vision. The vision has to make an end-run around unknown content in order to achieve two objectives: to create useful expectations of the content, the pieces and the whole. The vision should also make the need for personal realization of the vision understandable, thereby creating a sense of a possible personal future that is both:

higher (better in some moral sense), and
better (in the sense of personal efficacy)

An Integrating Vision can help all sorts of "teacher + class" groups achieve common learning goals.

Vision: Its Uses at Different Levels of Learning/Knowledge-Making
LEVEL	DESCRIPTION	INTERPRETATION
Instructivist	Learning material is acquired in presequenced, "bite-sized" chunks that have been preassembled by curriculum developer. In the Instructivist world, where knowledge has been analyzed into a sequence of objectives which when mastered progressively move the learner from not knowing (e.g., 'non reader') to knowing (e.g., 'proficient reader') the vision can motivate and inform the learner so that her/his energies and intellect can support the instructional efforts which are working on her/his behalf.	I think of this as the passive learning mode. This is how we typically teach reading and arithmetic skills in US schools. Even here ... a vision, which affords an alternative view (the same end, even the learning route, as seen from a different, and accessible, perspective) can support learner efficiency and motivation and commitment. Each will enhance total learning efficiency.
Deuterolearning	In the Deuterolearning world, where sequences of objectives play a varying yet always part-time role in learning, the vision can integrate and organize as student switches back and forth between instructivist and self-chosen experimental learning methods, as dictated by both strategy and vision.	The vision is a constant source of reference, here, as next objective and strategy are chosen from the staging platform which is present level of mastery. On more than one occasion the vision itself will be questioned and possibly be redesigned as its reality and accessibility are tested.
Research	And finally, in what may seem a novel twist, we have learning in the research world. In the research world the learning that is sought is knowledge presumed to be not yet known. There are no precut learning sequences. Here the vision is all there is.	In this situation there is no triangulation of already established method and predetermined sequence and end result, on the one hand, and the vision-based view of the same object, on the other. In this situation, it is not established that the vision is anything but a fantasy, an imagined allegorical possibility. In this situation, therefore, the vision plays an immense part of learning sequence design for the researcher or research team. At the same time, and of necessity, it is also subject to constant scrutiny and revision as its utility in moving researcher/research team to the desired end is put to the test.

In all cases the vision serves an orienting and motivating part which helps separates empty learning activities from those that are in fact inspired.

Textbooks Don't Work The Way They "Should"

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 20:39:48 GMT

Summary: Learning material that is accessible and manipulable in multiple ways allows individuals to use and acquire material in ways that work with each person's "learning strategy". The same content can be used quite differently if transferred from a linear paper form to an electronic wiki-ized form; there are multiple entry points and multiple workable forms of learning-related interaction.

I have no doubt that, in the right hands, the wiki-ized version will allow more learning and teaching to take place.

Will Richardson gives us an analysis of a textbook's deficiencies. (As usual brackets and emboldening are my devices for giving editorial emphasis).

Think about textbooks, for instance. I can't begin to guess the amount of money we spend on texts at my school but I'm sure it's a staggering amount. It's also a staggering waste. Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?
You can't search it.
You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.
You can't access it if it's not in your posession.
You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.
You can't share it in any meaningful way.
You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.
You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

[... the same material if put online in wiki form would allow students to go online] and [not only] consume the content [by reading the text material in original sequence] but also [by] interacting with it. [Argue with it] . Annotate it with their own examples and experiences. Be able to access it from home with their parents and experience it together.

Detoxifying The Child-Raising Environment: A Means for a Return to Power for Democrats

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 14:34:59 GMT

Summary: After reading of a tragic alcohol and car-based death of a popular, generous, but out of control, South Des Moines teenager I read Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's article "Closing the Parent Gap" , and I agree with her. "It's the culture, stupid" is probably the top-runner as an explanation for Bush's return to the Whitehouse.

Introduction
The 2004 election revealed a striking gap in the political leanings of people who are married with children: They favored the Republican, President George W. Bush, over the Democrat, Sen. John Kerry, by nearly 20 percentage points -- 59 percent to 40 percent. This married parent gap must now take its place in the popular political lexicon alongside previously established voter gaps such as the gender gap (in which women generally lean Democratic and men lean Republican) and the race gap (in which minorities lean heavily Democratic and whites lean heavily Republican).
It was not always like this. Democrats were successful in competing for married parents in the very recent past. Bill Clinton only narrowly lost them in 1992,and then narrowly won them in 1996. Bush opened up a 15-point married parent gap over Al Gore in the 2000 election (winning the group 56 percent to 41 percent). Clinton's success shows that Democrats should be able to compete for married parents again in the future -- or even win them.
Many Democrats have come to realize in the aftermath of theirdefeat last November that they must strike out beyond their traditional base of support if they want to start winning national elections again. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), for example, has begun to appeal to pro-life voters. And newly elected Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean has pledged to reach out to evangelical Christians.
But Democrats will not do better with married parents until they recognize one simple truth: Parents have a beef with popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages. To be credible, Democrats must acknowledge the legitimacy of parents' beef and make it unmistakably clear that they are on parents' side.

My guess is that parents, seeing the truth of this observation, have returned to and voted with the church. Until the Democrats offer a successful family-centered alternative the Christian Right (now quite at home in and deeply linked with the Republican party) is talking the only talk that offers a hopeful view. One that promises a more intact family and children who a) live to see adulthood and b) when there make us proud that they made it.

The following (from Barbara Whitehead's above-cited article) shows a move in the right direction [here, as usual, emboldening and underlining are mine]:

... Democratic Gov. Rod Blogojevich of Illinois has launched a campaign to ban the sale of violent video games to kids under 18 by setting stiff penalties for retailers. In addition, he has made effective use of the bully pulpit to assert a crucial principle."Parenting is hard work, and the state has a compelling interest in helping parents to raise children to upstanding men and women. [He and is wife jointly sign the following letter on the governor's website, modeling] how Democrats can combine support for parents with protest against the corporate marketers who peddle violence to kids.
To the parents of Illinois:
As parents our first responsibility to our children is to make sure they are safe and to teach them right from wrong. When we were growing up, our parents had to worry about what dangers we could encounter outside the home, but at least in the home, we were safe.
Today, with the advent of so many types of new technology, it is a lot more difficult to know what our children are doing. And with the multi-billion dollar industry geared towards marketing violent and sexually explicit video games to our children, is is harder to shield our children.
Too many of the video games marketed to our children teach them all of the wrong lessons and all the wrong values. These games use violence, rage and sexual aggression as play. That is not acceptable. When kids play, they should play like children, not like gangland assassins.

As my wife pointed out, while I was doing the mumbling that precedes an entry, we still have to change our personal lives; neither a Democratic nor a Republican government will do that for us. We need to learn to cut back on consumption and to both supervise and model a lifestyle that is rich in the good values. This probably won't happen with two parents working full-time.

Also, we need to go somewhere where we aren't the only ones in the neighborhood who are living this sort of life. If the government, any government, enables family-friendly neighborhood and community environments , we still have to step up and do the job that comes with raising a family. It would be nice if we had support and company in the effort, but it doesn't take away the fact that good child-raising starts, and ends, at home.
[via Jane Norman, Des Moines Register, 4/10/2005]
[Technorati Tags: family, family-life, popular culture, responsibility]

Deuterolearning and the Lifetime Personal Webspace

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 03:33:58 GMT

Summary: Learning to learn, aka metalearning or deuterolearning, is an important and still unusual intentionally chosen product of teaching endeavors. To so set a learning situation such that metalearning is highly likely and at the same time occurs in an evolving fashion based on each person's unique series of works (weblog entries on a personal website) ?? To facilitate and document this over the course of a lifetime of work? WOW!! This is what George Siemens is talking about in a recent entry.

Coincidentally, I just finished watching an interview in which an only-child actress admitted a considerable fogginess to her understanding of who/what she was before she was twelve. She went on to observe that in the absence of siblings and abiding friendships [her family moved frequently] --- and therefore in the absence of telling and retelling stories on and about each other-- one loses the chance to form and retain memories --memories, I would add, that are part of an evolving theory of self-in-life. The ability to systematically add to or alter life-view via interaction with personal artifacts (in her case remembered, because retold and abstracted many times in the conversations) is undermined without the individual and collectived artifacts to reinterpret.

In the entry below George Siemens excitedly ponders the consequences of having many artifacts to use in the constrant reconstruction of life view/life strategy as our lives play out and as our string of conscious leavings afford interpretation. (Until now, or so it now seems to me, only the biographers and students of the highly published had such material to work with.) However, now that we have the prospect of what George calls the A "Lifetime Personal Web Space" the reconstruction experience is available to a larger fraction of humanity.

A major aspect of this personal webspace is the presence of permanent tracings of self-understanding, self-questioning, world pondering, and life strategies as they are visited and revisited in the weblog.

Lifetime Personal Webspace: (Via Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom: Weblog Theory.)

(via George Siemens)

Now I know I'm kinda strange, but the premise of this article from Educause seriously gives me chills:
What do we wish for? That every citizen, at birth, will be granted a cradle-to-grave, lifetime personal Web space that will enable connections among personal, educational, social, and business systems.

Ok, now I know that's a lot to wrap your brain around, especially on a Friday afternoon. But if you are at all interested in the potential of the read/write Web and what it might evolve into, I think this is must reading. The paradigm shift is staggering, and the pedagogical foundation its build on is still pretty rickety, but think about some of this, for starters:
The LPWS will store searchable content (personal, educational,social, business) that was important in a user’s past and make it accessible for future use, as well as current projects. Since technology changes over time, the older sections of the Web space (for example, K-12 grade content) might be technologically less sophisticated, but would connect nonetheless to newer additions (such as postgraduate work activities).The primary user would decide whether a cell is private or public (potentially functioning as an e-portfolio or Web site) and who will be permitted to enter various parts of the structure. Some cells may be off-limits (even invisible) to all but the primary user. Moreover, the user will decide which cells connect to others and which do not. As the user matures, an analysis of the types and numbers of connections might assist in setting goals and strategies for subsequent personal and professional development.

Um, whoa. I seriously want one of these. And the benefits:
Few students maintain ready access to both the content and products from their K-12 years. College students typically sell their books and lose access to their collegiate course management Web sites. While an e-portfolio provides ready access to selected work products, intent and effort are required to transport content between separate, often incompatible systems. The LPWS construct will enable users to preserve more knowledge over time and to forge richer connections between their academic and work endeavors.

Read the scenario that's included. In fact, read the whole thing. What a concept.I think the reason this idea connects so strongly for me is because of what I've been mentioning recently about this being a learning log, and probably the most educational experience of my life. It's really wild when I think about it. For me, blogging just clicked; maybe I had the gene, or maybe it was because I always wanted to write, or that I'm an info junkie or a hundred other reasons. But I have sampled the Kool-Aid, and I really do believe. In some really strange way (remember, I am sorta out there...) it's like my recorded life began three years ago, and I really wish I had a more historical archive. Should have started earlier.

Anyway, this is what the read/write Web makes possible for us and for our students. We just have to grab it."

Educational Reform: Aiming for Engaged, Involved, Compassionate Graduates.

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 20:42:32 GMT

Summary: Towards the end that education turns around its present tendency to anesthetize and alienate students from their own lives and their own communities, I'm sharing the final passage of a recent article by Svi Shapiro for Tikkun Magazine. His arguments, written from the perspective of a Jewish spiritual tradition, make clear to me that significant contributions are possible and needed from all moral/spiritual communities. (Total article,

Shapiro, Svi, Education and Moral Values: Seeking a New Bottom Line, Tikkun (3/3/2005),

is accessible here)

Shapiro counsels critical engagement and deep reform. His reforms would place students in the middle of making a caring and just world. His arguments are well worth your time. I offer his concluding section below (trusting that you will be enticed to read the full paper in order to see how he got there). I have emboldened passages for emphasis.

Between Fundamentalisms

Our world is now stretched between the poles of two fundamentalisms. The “religion” of the untrammeled free-market is rapidly turning every dimension of our lives, needs, desires, and purposes into matters of money and materialism—a world in which every aspect of our being appears as nothing but an entry on a profit and loss sheet. In response to this we witness the growth of intolerant and authoritarian faiths that offer a defense of spiritual and moral values but do so in ways that often demean and diminish non-believers and see the world through the lens of a dogmatic certainty. Neither path offers the means to address the deepening moral crisis in ways that can bring about a more loving, compassionate, and meaningful human existence.

It is in this context—of great danger yet still of extraordinary human possibility—that we must examine what it means to educate our children for the twenty-first century. We need to remind ourselves again of the distinction between schooling and education. Schooling can be made fairer and less subject to the advantages and disadvantages of race, social class, gender, immigrant status, and so on. We can distribute resources more fairly, be less culturally biased in our teaching and testing, and certainly open up more opportunities for those who have been disadvantaged to find new possibilities in their lives. Make no mistake: all of this would be a good thing for both individuals and for our society as a whole, but none of this, in itself, would bring us much closer to what it might mean to educate for the challenges of our new century.

To educate our students for tomorrow’s challenges we need something far more transformative in our thinking. We must reconceive education as a field that is not just about the learning of skills, the capacity to solve problems, or the ingesting of information. We need to think of the education we give our children as a process that addresses mind, heart, and spirit. In other words, as a process that forms us as mature individuals and as people who live in relationship with others. Do we really need more kids who know how to play the grading and testing games that schools now encourage? Do we really doubt that what we need instead are human beings who have the capacity to meet the extraordinary challenges and demands that are before us as a civilization?

We know something about the education that this transformative vision will entail. We recognize that it must engage students in terms of the totality of their beings, not in the shrunken and limited ways that our schools now demand. It means to take seriously the quest for citizens who can discern truth (or at least what is truer) from the distortions and deceit that surround us in our culture—students, in other words, who can think critically and can problematize the knowledge and meanings they are presented with in their everyday world. It means to take very seriously the goal of an education concerned with the ethical quality of our lives and our society, central to which is the quest for a global culture that ensures the dignity and well-being of each and every person. And, finally, it means an education that can affirm the spiritual dimension of our existence—one that awakens in each person the sense of beauty, wonder, and preciousness of all life on our planet and the interdependence that makes continuation of this life possible.

The task before us and our children, to transform the world of so much unnecessary suffering, hurt, indignity, and injustice is too great for any one person to address. It is clearly a task that must employ the minds and bodies of many of us if change is to come. We must teach the value of participation in the task of tikkun olam, the repair and healing of our world, without either succumbing the sense of futility that may come from minimizing what we can do or exaggerating the contributions that one individual may make. The first leads to cynicism and the second to hubris. More realistically, in our work with young people, we may emphasize the teaching of Rabbi Tarfon who asserted that “it is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you excused from participating in it.” We must teach the young that, while we should have a realistic appreciation of the limits of what may be possible, the only justifiable purpose of education in our time is that of bettering the world we have all been given. All the rest is mere commentary.

Svi Shapiro teaches in the Program on Education and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This article is excerpted from Education Without Meaning, Lives Without Purpose: Schools and Kids in the Age of Educational Reform to be published in 2005. © 2005 Lawrence Erlbaum. All rights reserved.

(Via Tikkun Magazine.)

Developing Self-Directed Learners, Some Current Work

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:36:38 GMT

Summary: A few months ago (12/2004) NWREL (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory) published an informative article on enhancing students self-directedness, written because that issue was on the top category of regional school leaders' concerns. Besides the link to the article (near bottom of entry) there are (a) links within the report for the metacognitive (aka deuterolearning and learning to learn) aspects of the findings, and (b) to weblog entries I've made on the subject.

Metacognition* is listed as one of several issues influencing self-directedness (also involved: also self-efficacy, motivation, self-advocacy).

In Table I classroom implications and research references for all pieces of self-directedness are provided.

Check out this reference* to Ngeow & Kong's approach to learning to learn.

[ via Developing Self-Directed Learners: "TOPICAL SUMMARY DECEMBER 2004 NORTHWEST REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL LABORATORY, Office of Planning and Service Coordination]
----------------------
See the University of Delaware's own compilation of references on problem-based learning.

Finally, you might want to look at my weblog entries

"Learning to Learn (aka metalearning, deuterolearning) Knowledge About Self and Learning--High Proven Payoff" and
a comparison of group learning approaches, including deuterolearning and "communitarian", in the entry Learning in Groups: Maybe schools should be more businesslike??!!

---------------
*[links take you within the NWREL report, thanks to granular addressing via purpleslurple. Read about it and get your own bookmarklet here]

Weblogs in Educational Settings: Undergraduate and Graduate

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:19:21 GMT

Summary: I note Henry Farrell's (via Stephen Downes) characterization of educational weblogs, and then add a thought or two about my own online instructional experience with same.

Weblogging: To set the stage Stephen Downes reminds us of both history and uses of weblogs generally:

Blogging is something defined by format and process, not by content. A blog, therefore, is and has always been more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers. Blogs are, in their purest form, the core of what has come to be called personal publishing. In the hands of teachers and students, blogs become something more again. The Web is by now a familiar piece of the educational landscape, and for those sites where personal publishing or chronologically ordered content would be useful, blogs have stepped to the fore. Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell identifies five major uses for blogs in education.

First, teachers use blogs to replace the standard class Web page. Instructors post class times and rules, assignment notifications,suggested readings, and exercises. Aside from the ordering of material by date, students would find nothing unusual in this use of the blog. The instructor, however, finds that the use of blogging software makes this previously odious chore much simpler.
Second, and often accompanying the first, instructors begin to link to Internet items that relate to their course. Mesa Community College's Rick Effland, for example, maintains a blog to pass along links and comments about topics in archaeology. Though Mesa's archaeology Web pages have been around since 1995, blogging allows Effland to write what are in essence short essays directed specifically toward his students. Effland's entries are not mere annotations of interesting links. They effectively model his approach and interest in archaeology for his students.
Third, blogs are used to organize in-class discussions. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, for example, Alexander Halavais added a blog to his media law class of about 180 students. Course credit was awarded for online discussion, with topics ranging from the First Amendment to libel to Irish law reform. As the course wound down with a discussion of nude bikers, Halavais questioned whether he would continue the blog the following year because of the workload, but students were enthusiastic in their comments.
Mireille Guay, an instructor at St-Joseph, notes: "The conversation possible on the weblog is also an amazing tool to develop our community of learners. The students get to know each other better by visiting and reading blogs from other students. They discover, in a non-threatening way, their similarities and differences. The student who usually talks very loud in the classroom and the student who is very timid have the same writing space to voice their opinion. It puts students in a situation of equity."
Fourth, some instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings. Used in this way, the blogs become "group blogs"--that is, individual blogs authored by a group of people. Farrell notes: "It becomes much easier for the professor and students to access the readings for a particular week--and if you make sure that people are organized about how they do it, the summaries will effectively file themselves.
Finally, fifth, students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade. Educational Technologist Lane Dunlop wrote about one class at Cornell College: "Each day the students read a chunk of a book and post two paragraphs of their thoughts on the reading." In another class, French 304, students were given a similar exercise. Using a French-language blogging service called Monblogue, Molly, a business student, posted a few paragraphs every day.

As for Me:

First, in describing my experience with weblogging in classes, I should note that my experience is apparently unlike those described above. I am referring to a 95-100% online class, with rare or at most occasional face-to-face meetings. Thus, I had to address the question ," what software shall I use for the bulk of my transactions with individuals, groups, and the class as-a-whole". Blackboard was my answer. In Blackboard simple, predictable communication systems (file transfer, instant messenger equivalent, threaded discussions, test systems, etc.) were already present and managed by institutional staff. While I had the "license" to do an all-online class any way I chose (given that I was willing to carry the consequences) , I would have had to spend far too many hours kludging together what was already "freely" available.

Thus, the question became : "How can weblogs supplement the online technology already present via Blackboard?" Note the already present requirement that all participate in online discussions around weekly topics. Each class member would have generated 2-3 paragraph (min) responses to general questions relating to text readings and evolving class experience; each was required to respond-to-others entries within the same discussion. Thus, a considerable amount of "formal" communication --in both "initial" and "response" forms -- had already been generated by and among class members.

This context shaped my use of weblogs:

The class had a journal requirement (roughly thirty double spaced pages over the course of the semester) which could be submitted via Word files or via a free Blogger account to which I and other students could visit. Most chose the Word files. [You can see, I think, that the technological and intellectual load was already substantial]. Those that did opt for the Blogger version of their journal appear to enjoy and profit considerably. I and they enjoyed the more frequent give-and-take. Word files simply did not work out as well in the "interactivity" sense--though the journals continue to catalyse personal understanding. [I am coming to feel that the weblog should be required, merged with discussionsand framed within the context of a community blogging experience. This will, I think, maximize the self-discovery and deuterolearning (aka learning-to-learn) aspects of the class.]
I use a weblog (Radio Userland's) to provide daily/weekly instructor updates; instead of the weblog itself, I used the outliner provided by Radio Userland. This allowed me to give one web address which students could visit [news readers would have been adding an additional technology to an already full plate]and which I could update(from wherever) within my own copy of Radio as the class progressed. What was in this outlined version of my weblog?
- daily/weekly instructor updates of assignments, discussions, readings
- a comprehensive set of content links (first an initial starter set which was changed to keep pace with the evolving class ontology), and
- a class-by-class process prediction following a process retrospective for most recent class sessions.

Reconfiguring Education

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 16:55:16 GMT

Summary: Ivan Illich , more than thirty years ago, had much to say about educational Reform. His analysis, excerpted below, makes clear how much his and John Taylor Gatto's analyses overlap. His recommendations seem to directly address the issues of involvement, community and relationship which are missing in their high and positive forms, in the ennumbing schools that Gatto so accurately and poignantly derides.

Illich said[bracketed material is mine, SPH]:

"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value.

Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators'curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

Reference Services to Educational Objects[~]which facilitateaccess to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of thesethings can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rentalagencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; otherscan be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but madeavailable to students as apprentices or on off-hours. [Stephen Downes' Old Daily has numerous mentions of
just such entities. See Downes essay for a comprehensive start.]

Skill Exchanges[~]which permit persons to list their skills,the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models forothers who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which theycan be reached.
Peer Matching[~]a communication network which permits personsto describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in thehope of finding a partner for the inquiry.
Reference Services to Educators-at-large[~]who can be listedin a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions ofprofessionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along withconditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see,could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients."
[via Dave Pollard's How to Save the World]
---------

An Epitaph of sorts was penned for Illich just after his death in November 2002
"Ivan Illich

This is as good a manifesto as any:
"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational."

From Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, who died Monday in Germany.
By Unknown, November, 2002 as penned into Stephen's Web

Online Illich Resources;

Tools for Conviviality(1973)

Infed Entry and Links(2002)

Education Without School, How It Can Be Done (1971)

Ultimate Schools, Sixteen Criteria, D.D. Douglas and Adaptive Learning Model of M.C Wang.

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 22:28:05 GMT

Summary: David Dwight Douglas (of www.ultimate-schools.com) offers debate points for ultimate schools: "I theorize that a considerably protracted dialog among child development experts (other than educators) would eventually arrive at a single, unified concept of the ultimate school, ideal for all children, in all situations and in all communities [sigma] I do not expect that the ultimate school, though it might be clearly defined, will ever be accepted or practical. No ultimate ever is." Mr. Douglas' debate points are presented below, followed by a summary of MC Wang's Adaptive Learning Model (as conceptual outline--which is in "play"-- of how Mr. D's concerns might play out.)

Mr Douglas continues:

Examine these sixteen critieria for their relevance and value[sigma] [rather than being a process-based or methods model it] measures what is actually learned and accomplished rather than what is taught or intended.
The sixteen criteria are as follows:

The extent to which each student has his own custom-tailored curriculum that is continually updated according to his actual progress.

The extent to which education is driven by the students' desire to learn rather than the teachers' need to teach.

The extent to which media rather than teachers lecturing is the primary source of information.

The extent to which every student has a steacher who takes the time to become a respected mentor, advisor, and close friend.

The extent to which parents are directly involved in the educational work of their child.

The extent to which the educational process is measusred entriely by what was actually learned rather than by what was taught and for how long.

The extent to which there is continual educational and social interchange between students of widely different ages and backgrounds.

The extent to which there are a sizable number of registered adult volunteers working directly with students on a regular basis.

The extent to which students formally evaluate themselves, their teachers, and their school on a regular basis.

The extent to which students are aactively involved in the polices and operations of their school.

The extent to which students' behavior is motivated by self-control and consideration for others rather than by rules and punishments.

The extent to which significant contributions of material support are donated to the school by members of the community on a regular basis.

The extent to which students and teachers go to school each day feeling safe, challenged, appreciated and needed.

The extent to which the school is the central focus of community activities.

The extent to which the school is open year round and for extended hours.

The extent to which the school's diploma accurately represents each student's achievements and is held in very high regard by higher education and business institutions.

There seems to be considerable overlap with at least one model, one which has achieved recognition and research-based distinction, the Adaptive Learning Model championed and developed by Margaret C. Wang(summarized in the section immediately below this paragraph). While the word-for-word overlap isn't perfect, I suspect that the model's implementation would contribute considerably to realization of all 16 of Mr. Douglas' stipulated criteria. I leave you to the study of the overlap between the ALM summary(below) and the 16 Douglas criteria.

How Is The Model Implemented In A School?

The Adaptive Learning Environments Model is designed to provide instruction that is responsive to student needs and to provide school staff with ongoing professional development and school-based program implementation support to achieve student success. Implementation features the following design elements.

-Individualized Progress Plans consist of two components. The first is a highly structured prescriptive component for basic skills mastery. In addition, an exploratory component provides learning opportunities that foster student self-direction and problem-solving ability while fostering social and personal development to enhance student learning success.

-A Diagnostic-Prescriptive Monitoring System incorporates a standards-based curriculum and assessment system to ensure student mastery of subject-matter knowledge and learning skills.

-A Classroom Instruction-Management System provides implementation support that focuses on student self-responsibility and teacher teaming in implementing a coordinated approach to instructional and related service delivery.

-A Data-Based Professional Development Program provides ongoing training and technical assistance support that is targeted to meet the implementation support needs of the individual staff.

-A School-Based Restructuring Process provides school and classroom organizational support and redeployment of school resources and staff expertise to achieve and sustain a high degree of program implementation.

-An active Family Involvement Program is targeted to support student learning success.

When a high degree of implementation is achieved, a unique classroom scenario is created. Students can be found working in virtually every area of the classroom, engaging in a variety of learning activities, including participating in small-group instruction, receiving one-to-one tutoring, or engaging in peer-based collaborative activities. Teachers circulate among the students, instructing and providing corrective feedback.

Instruction is based on diagnostic test results and informal assessments by the teacher. Every student is expected to make steady progress in meeting the curricular standards. Learning tasks are broken down into incremental steps, providing frequent opportunities for evaluation.

What Is The Evidence That The Model Is Successful?

-In schools where the Adaptive Learning Environments Model components have been adopted, data are collected on degree of implementation, classroom processes, and student outcomes, such as student achievement and student attitudes about their schools and learning experience. Findings from over two decades of implementation of the model in a variety of school settings provide consistent evidence that effective implementation leads to positive changes in classroom process. These changes result in intended academic, attitudinal, and social competence outcomes.

-In classrooms where a high degree of implementation is achieved, teachers tend to spend more time on instruction than on managing students and students tend to be highly task oriented. Steady and productive interaction between teachers and students, and among students, replaces the passive learning mode typically found in conventional classrooms. Interactions among students, for the most part, focus on sharing ideas and working together on learning tasks. Distracted behavior on the part of individual students is minimal and does not seem to interfere with the work of others.

-Standardized achievement test scores in reading and math indicate that implementation of the model consistently leads to student achievement that meets or exceeds expected gains. Achievement results from various sites over the years have compared favorably with comparison sites in terms of national test norms, as well as district and population norms. Significant differences have been found with special education students who are integrated in regular Adaptive Learning Environments classes.

The Biggest Reason for School Reform: The Loss of Our Children

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:28:24 GMT

Summary: John Taylor Gatto highlights and explains the singular unproductivity of American Schools.He observes that the once strikingly powerful American character, chronicled by de Toqueville -and noted particularly in our children, has all but disappeared.[Such character has been replaced by sensuous and relatively mindless creatures with relatively little character, originality or self-sufficiency. They seem more and more like the Eloi, right out of HG Wells Time Machine. It's for you to guess who the Morlocks --those that prey upon the Eloi-- might be.

This result has been achieved in less than 100 years. Perhaps, if we can find the collective intelligence and will, we can consciously undo the damage in 50??!!

In his own words [extracted from his essay AGAINST SCHOOL How public education cripples our kids, and why ]:

"Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

To make good people.

To make good citizens.

To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven , was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable." [the emboldening is mine, SPH]

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State , and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education , in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That , unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country.

In another essay, The Six Lesson School Teacher*, Gatto left out the ideological provenence and just gave us the effect: the true school curriculum, the one that we teach best of all. In it there are six understandings for each student to master (All the rest is just smoke and mirrors):

Lesson 1: Stay in the Class Where You Belong

Lesson 2: Turn On and Off Like a Light Switch

Lesson 3: Surrender Your Will to a Predestined Chain of Command

Lesson 4: Only I [the school/the teacher, SPH] Will Determine What Curriculum You Will Study

Lesson 5: Your Self Respect Should Depend on An Observer's Measure of Your Worth

Lesson 6: You are Being Watched

*This article was originally published in the Fall '91 issue of Whole Earth Review

The Measurement of Potential (3): The MAPS process

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:20:02 GMT

Untitled Document

Summary: Up to this point in the series of entries on measuring potential I have been, perhaps, unduly technical. Unduly because my concern with my children, my grandchildren, your children , all children and all people, is that they have some opportunities and support to develop a best version of themselves. "Best", I know, can be defined in many ways, mine is moderate.

If you, as a social planner, use people to achieve large-scale purposes, you might define 'best' in terms that have a collective purpose efficiently realized. In so doing, i.e.,using the individual as tool for societal betterment, you will probably neglect, in a very important sense, the needs and wishes of the individual herself. (In this context by "very important sense" I mean specifically the individual's "greatest or highest or broadest" potential capabilities . If you, as an educator or parent or social-planner, do not energetically pursue the realization of these capabilities for each child you are demonstrating negligence, a negligence we cannot afford to accept .)

After providing a child with survival skills for the environment in which present life takes place,one's next obligation (as parent, teacher, mentor) is to help each child to pursue and realize their greatest or highest or broadest potential. After survival has been taken care of, the discovery of that greatest/highest/broadest potential is a matter of negotiation and deep thought; probably, too, it will involve focused and intense effort not only on the part of the individual but on the part of those who intend to nurture that becoming, that development.

Skeptical you! You ask why we should do this? Is it simply a nice (and ultimately empty and child indulgent) way to look at the societal up-bringing of children? I say "No!" because these higher strivings, including the realization of some of them, express the dignity we have by, some would say Divine, right and realize the dignity that it is for each of us to pursue. Also, and separately, I would argue that to use this strategy may well surface talents and skills that have a much higher social benefit than were we to render a "one size fits all" education!

I finish this entry by saying teachers and parents would get a big start on this higher goal if they joined to think intensely about, and investigate, just which areas of life most distinguish and dignify each child. These findings would then be placed be at the center of "deep schooling". (Deep schooling is the schooling that enables the education of the "higher" version of each child.)

One system for carrying out this process was developed originally for children with disabilities. It's called the McGill Action Planning System or MAPS, for short. It is carried out by those that deeply know the child for whom [educational] actions are being planned, parents, friends, neighbors. Their findings are to inform the future education of that child. (Go to the link for a deeper understanding of the process)

When you read the questions that drive this process you will see why I maintain that those questions should drive the efforts at schooling every child.

To use the MAPS process, key people in the student's life gather and talk in one, two, or three sessions. In total, the sessions may take about three hours, and it is preferable to split that time up if the planning is for a very young child. Among the people participating are the student, the student's parents, the classroom teachers (both regular and special education), and other school professionals such as counselors, therapists, or the school principal. Another person acts as the group's leader or facilitator, and keeps the group on task. The group is completed with a couple of the student's peers, who are, perhaps, the most important component in the student's full participation at school, and other members of the student's family, such as siblings or grandparents.

First, the family members present answer the question "What is the individual's history?" Then, each of the people present at the MAPS session will focus on the remaining six questionsthat are included in the MAPS process.

"What is your dream for the child?"
As they answer this question, the people are encouraged to think about what they want for the student and what they think the student wants. This is a question of "vision," and, therefore, the people answering it shouldn't be bogged down with present-day realities. The team members should dream some here and verbalize those dreams. If enough people share their dreams, they can work toward those dreams becoming a reality.

"What is your nightmare?"
Parents sometimes find this particularly hard to answer, for no parent likes to think of their child facing difficulties. But if the members of the group can verbalize their nightmares and fears, they will have taken an important step in becoming committed to making sure this nightmare never occurs.

"Who is the student?"
Everyone talks about what comes to their mind when they think of the student, and they express this in a few words. Everyone takes a turn at the description; then, the people continue taking this idea around the circle until no one has anything else to add. People in the group can pass on their turn if they can't think of anything, but they are encouraged to try when it is their turn again. Then, when the list is completed, particular people in the group, such as family members, are asked to identify what they believe are three especially important descriptors.

"What are the student's gifts?"
The people in the circle might look back on the ways they have described the student in answering the previous question. The MAPS group members are asked to focus on what they believe the student can do, instead of, as happens so often, what the student cannot do.

"What are the student's needs?"
The parents' answers to this question might vary considerably from those of the student's peers or teachers. When the list has been completed, the group then decides which of the needs are "top priority," or demand immediate attention.

"What would an ideal day at school be like for the student?"
Some MAPS groups find it helpful to answer this question by outlining a typical school day for other children the student's age, who do not have disabilities. The team might think about how the needs outlined before could be met at school. After that, the team would think about the kinds of help a student would need to truly achieve inclusion at school.

I believe that the MAPS process--the careful and detailed answering of these questions --would be likely to give material that would allow the inference of gifts and future dignities just as much as it would allow the understanding of disabilities. This material, rendered by caring and intimately involved nurturers, would be extremely supportive to any efforts to design instructional environments and processes that would be likely to enable an education (deep schooling) that effectively pursues individual potential.

I'll leave it to another entry to add some thoughts on the "testology" of deep schooling.

The Measurement of Potential (2)

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:25:30 GMT

Summary: It is possible to estimate potential using testing procedures. By determining absolute degree of mastery of , say, communication skills, we can learn what portion of the cultural knowledge bank is known by an individual. If we combine this measure of absolute mastery with a determination of an individual’s relative mastery (a comparison of one individual’s results with those results achieved by people who are similar, e.g., same age, gender, economic status, family make-up) we can get one measure of “potential”. If we do this in each of multiple areas we should get a profile of that individual’s various potentials (See my previous entry for details.).

If we have done what I said we should do (i.e., we have made it a matter of course that we establish what our four year olds are capable of, in both absolute and relative sense in each of multiple areas of human achievement) we will have a profile of potential for each individual.

Take , for example, Andrea. We have reported the absolute percent of all known skills, values and knowledges in each of our fields of the human knowledge base. Those skills are profiled below.

You can see by the vertical placement of the boxes that, for example, Andrea knows 3.0% of what there is of ethical understanding, 1.50% of what there is to know of general cultural knowledge, 1.00% of listening skills, 2.0% of expressive skills, 1.75% of introspective skills, 0.5% of what there is considered to be known of natural history, ecologies, and etc. The placement of AndreaÕs score boxes represents the percent of knowable human skill, understanding, initiative,intutition, etc. that Andrea has mastered. Naturally, since since this is AndreaÕs first assessment, near the beginning learning career, her absolute mastery is small. But, even with this small amount of knowledge she shows herself, her potential, to us. She gives us strong inklings of her potential via the patterns of her actual mastery of that material.

There is more that we can learn about A’s potential. One way to her potential is by comparing her her mastery of some subject with mastery of that same subject by other students of the same age. These comparisons are quite revealing, particulary if made with students who are the same age and otherwise have much in common with each other.

The numbers within the boxes indicate how Andrea compares to girls like her. Scanning these numbers we note that amongst these girls Andrea is in the top 5% in Musical, Ethical and Mathematical skills, in the high middle in most other things except Natural History (understanding about natural systems, plants, animals, weather etc.) for which she is in the bottom 40% of 4 year old girls like her.

Whatever you think of this profile ,it says a “real” thing about what she can do. It probably says something quite real about what she will be very able, and not able, to do in the coming years.I believe that if you use it to plan teaching and learning for Andrea you will be a more effective teacher or parent.

I will have more to say, in one or more future entries, about the use of this information. I’ll finish this entry by saying that I think all students will be served far better, in terms of personally significant new knowledge acquired in school, if

their profiles are central to planning of their instruction and to the degree that
the school and parents hold themselves accountable to help each student make real movement, supported by portfolio- and test-based evidence, each area, each year

In bold strokes this a potential-oriented schooling plan. If we do this, I argue, we will serve Andrea and all other students better. Far better, I would say, than providing a one size fits all education in an environment that only infrequently holds itself accountable for provable, useful learning — even in, ironically, these days of No child left behind!! The standard school approach is to assign material and strategy by age group. If one is in the fourth grade one gets a certain number of hours of a prescribed fourth grade curriculum, provided by text and workbook publishers. At the secondary level,in, for example, American History, one gets the textbook which is (a) assigned because of university entrance requirements (not because of present skills and the unique potential each is seeking to develop) and (b) taught in a standard manner that has been organized by the publisher. A potential-targeted curriculum would be different. The major targets of learning would be different from student to student.

The Measurement of Potential (1)

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 12:06:53 GMT

Summary: It’s one thing to say that we will develop the potential in each child. It’s another to know what we’re talking about.

In order to see what schools need to build from we will need a means to make an estimate of potential [It will be some early “snapshot” of potential, just how that snapshot is to be taken is our concern. The estimate of potential will be an extrapolation from present behavioral indications].

Ill have to spend some thought on this before I can lay out the specs for an evaluation of how well schools are doing in this territory. Without some careful forethought Ill be just like the apologists or the rabid critics: constructing phrases of rant that have neither thoughtful nor empirical roots in the realities of schooling or the lives and hopes of families and the students they are gifting to the next generation.

So here goes; one hypothesis concerning an individual’s eventual adult potential will be that her or his present absolute and relative strength of skill, re age-mates, will indicate both:

where s/he will stand relative to age-mates in the future and
what absolute “cultural literacy” will be present at the conclusion of schooling.

For starters let’s assess each child at age four (age arbitrarily chosen … meant to get in there early —before before schooling has begun). Further, let’s test in each of the following areas (no particular order but meant to represent a cross-section of important sensibilities (see Gardner via Guignon in Education World , for example, for a more formal presentation of a closely related set of capabilities. Or, see a summary of J.P. Guilford’s Structure of Intellect at the TIP psychology site). Our assessment will include careful measurement of the following skills:

listening skills,
speaking skills,
numerical awareness and understanding,
general cultural information,
eye-hand coordination,
bodily coordination,
musical (tone, rhythm, pitch, melody) skills,
ethical understanding,
social skills
introspective skills
mechanical skills
skills at understanding and working with natural systems and creatures
esthetic and design sensitivities and skills.

Next, we’ll concern ourselves with what we might have and what we might do with it. The end goal: to get better and better at helping individuals to realize their own, unique, “potential”

What's Excellent: Who Knows Best?

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:06:02 GMT

Summary: Wouldn't we all be better if we were accountable for the quality of what we in fact do? Yes, certainly, but the measure of quality is no easy thing to construct. First, to distinguish, there are the judgements associated with planning action (polls) and the judgements associated with after the fact evaluations of actions , and consequences(ratings). This entry focuses on ratings.

Here is a sampling of "ratings" links :

Grade the News (site run by John McManus through Stanford University's Journalism Department),
RateMyTeachers (a site run by student volunteers with the announced purpose to: make this website a valuable resource for both students and parents. ,
RateMyProfessors(sister site to RateMyTeachers; professor ratings based on overall quality and ease),
Sports ratings via USA Today from Jeff Sagarin
Ratings of countries for freedom (Freedom House),
Ratings of consumer items at ConsumerReports.org,
A Child and Family WebGuide listing, describing and rating websites which offer topical advice to families and children via the "Web" ,
On and on... any topic--> some kind of rating until we find
A Guide to, actually ratings of,ratings for "any" topic at ArgusClearinghouse.

As my list illustrates, it's easy for thoughts to range widely here.

Certainly the intentions of the actor have be counted? But, equally central, are the desires of the other affected by the action. Is quality to be judged by each separately, by both jointly? If its a repeated action, a dance danced more than once, is it judged each time on the fly or by "permanent" standards . In either case both the nature and dynamics would be interesting and crucial.

A group situation is more complex, obviously. How is set of transactions in a group or larger social context to be judged? By the standards set by a committee for actors with certain roles -- or with certain intentions? By the standards set by recipients? By the desires of recipients at the onset or outset of transactions?

All of these questions, and more, surface when I think about teaching. I have to admit that I start from a biased position... which I will hold onto, at least for now, the one that says that however teaching is evaluated (rated) a(the?) central criterion will be whether the individual's potential is well served.

Weblogged Learning

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:31:26 GMT

Summary: There should be some way to document both the perceived and 'real' benefits of blogging from both teacher and student points of view; Online surveying technologies come to mind for the perceived benefits; online surveys accompanied by tests, online or not, would allow access to both.

As Jeremy Williams and Dan Mitchell point out, there are bloggers out there who are spreading the Word with great energy! Perhaps old fashioned rigor would provide very useful information!

Exploring the Use of Blogs as LearningSpaces in the Higher Education Sector (pdf).
The authors write that "the chief purpose of this paper is to comment, critically, on the potential for blogs as 'learning spaces' for students within the higher education sector," which it does with an examination of how blogs have been used at Harvard Law School and Queensland University of Technology. Some interesting bits, including some reflection on the dearth of refereed literature about blogging (the edu-bloggers tending to put the work in their blogs instead, where it is subject to a rather more vigorous screening). "The fact of the matter is that blogging, for all intents and purposes, is a grassroots phenomenon. For this reason, academic bloggers, if they are true to their ideals, may be more concerned about spreading their message in the blogosphere than in the 'Journal of Obscure Facts'! ... blogging seems to be working in practice, but does it work in theory?" Some empirical research, which may as well be published in an academic journal, where standards are lower, since a sample of 51 self-selected people wouldn't stand a moment's scrutiny in the blogging community. By Jeremy B Williams and Joanne Jacobs, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, Summer, 2004.

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