Beyond The Textbook - Your Thoughts?

Over spring break I'll be attending Discovery Education's Second Annual(?) Beyond The Textbook Forum:

Last year, we brought together more than twenty content experts and leaders amongst the EdTech community for an open conversation about the future of digital resources. . . This year, we plan to start right where we left off. Forum participants will explore the past and present of digital curriculum, and then collaborate to ideate what the future ought to be.

We have split the event into two days. The first, Wednesday March 27th, will be spent in small group conversations with teams from Discovery Education. While optional, there are many people within the company that would love to tap into your collective brainpower. We know that you each bring a unique perspective to the table and hope you will share your knowledge with our teams.

The main event will take place on Thursday March 28th. It will involve in-depth conversations and brainstorms identifying ideas that aren't just theoretical, but actionable. We have handpicked a forum representing all grade levels, subject areas and roles within the education space.

(Full Disclosure: While I am not getting paid to attend, Discovery is paying all my travel expenses.)

You can read Dean's post (and the links) for more on last year's event, or check out Steve Dembo's delicious bookmarks. (You can also follow this year's forum at the twitter hashtag #beyondtextbooks, although you'll also find lots of other folks thinking about this topic at that hashtag). I imagine this year will be similar in some respects, but very different in other respects. For example, Discovery just announced they will be producing a Math Tech Book in 2014, and the attendees of this year's forum have a definite math tint to them, so I imagine we'll be talking about possibilities in the mathematics arena a bit more.

I have my own ideas, of course, but I would love for some of you to share some of your own ideas in the comments. What does the future of "digital resources" look like? What does the next generation digital "textbook" look like (and "textbook" is used very loosely here)? Specifically, I'd love to hear from math folks (and others) what would a "Mathematics Tech Book" include?

As you think about this, keep your options wide open. Certainly Discovery is looking for ways to package something that not only adds value for our students, but that they can actually package, sell and monetize. But don't limit your own thinking to what you think they could "produce" and "sell," but really think about what kind of digital resource(s) you would want to support your classroom (math or otherwise).

I'll share any comments you leave with the Forum on March 27th and 28th.

Do You Believe in Algebra?

(Cross-posted on The Huffington Post).

Let me clarify. I'm not asking do you believe in Algebra in the same sense as do you believe in the tooth fairy (full disclosure: I do not). I'll posit that Algebra exists. Rather I'm asking if you believe in Algebra as a separate course/curriculum that we should teach in high school.

After my last post, Dean Shareski wrote a thought-provoking post that asked whether it was possible to offer a customized educational experience in a standards-based system of education.

Our current system and structure fights personalized learning with nearly every new policy and protocol it can generate. The system craves standardization while we desperately need customization. These competing ideals butt heads constantly and for those teachers who do believe in personalizing learning, they live in perpetual frustration. . . In the end, without a restructuring of time and current curriculum requirements the best we can hope for is small pockets of success or the .02 percent of students whose passion happens to be trigonometry or Shakespeare.

Dean later acknowledges, however, that while he wants personalization, he also wants students exposed to a broader range of ideas:

While I'm busy advocating for changes that might support an education that fuels and fosters students' passions, I worry that we lose sight of what a liberal education is all about. They don't know what they don't know. Providing students with broad experiences that invites them to develop a variety of skills, understand and appreciate diverse perspectives and potentially uncover hidden talents and interests speaks to a fairly well accepted purpose of school. . . If we were truly starting education from scratch today, I can't imagine we'd build the same system we have. There would be lots of discussion as to what types of content all students need. Even if core content and skills could be determined, we'd never teach them all as segmented subjects taught in isolation in 45-minute increments.

And therein lies the dilemma - is it possible to provide in a systemic way a customized educational experience for all students that both allows and encourages them to pursue their passions, but also exposes them to the wide range of human endeavors that they may have little or no knowledge about and therefore wouldn't be able to even know if they were passionate about in the first place?

Which brings us back to Algebra. I teach in Colorado, which recently adopted the Common Core State Standards. In general, I believe the Common Core Math Standards (pdf) are much better than most standards that came before them. First, there are fewer of them, with 156 standards for grades 9-12. In addition, 38 of those standards are identified as "advanced" standards, which leaves us with 118 standards for all students spread out over four years of high school, or just under 30 per year. That's much, much more doable then what we had before, and I believe targets much more of what I would consider mathematics that is essential for people to know.

But it still begs the question of whether all students need these 118 standards. For example, do you believe that all students (scratch, that, all people) need to know "there is a complex number i such that i² = -1, and every complex number has the form a + bi with a and b real?" (CCSS, N-CN 1). Or how about "prove the Pythagorean identity sin²(x) + cos²(x) = 1 and use it to find sin(x), cos (x), or tan(x) and the quadrant of the angle?" (CCSS, F-TF 8).

(My not-so-modest proposal is that no state legislature is allowed to require standards that they couldn't demonstrate proficiency on themselves. Since they are clearly successful adults and they are saying that these standards are necessary for all students to be successful, surely they'd be able to demonstrate proficiency by taking the same tests our students do. But I digress.)

As G.V. Ramanathan recently asked in the Washington Post:

How much math do we really need?

In an age of information abundance, when Wolfram Alpha can do pretty much all of high school math quickly and at no charge, do all students need to be able to know all 118 standards? When instructional videos (either homegrown or created by others like Khan Academy) exist that replicate many aspects of a traditional math classroom and allow students to learn the skills at a time and a place of their own choosing, what activities should be taking place in our math classrooms?


Consider these statistics:

1985: 3,800,000 Kindergarten students
1998: 2,810,000 High school graduates
1998: 1,843,000 College freshman
2002: 1,292,000 College graduates (34%)
2002: 150,000 STEM majors (3.9%)
2006: 1,200 PhD's in mathematics (0.03%)

(source: presentation by Steve Leinwand, American Institutes for Research at NCTM Regional Conference in Denver on October 7, 2010. His source U.S. Statistical Abstract)

There's lots we could talk about with those statistics, but I'm just going to focus on what percentage of our students truly need the Common Core Math Standards. I would suggest that it's most likely somewhere between the 3.9% and the 34%, which makes me wonder how "core" they really are. While I think Common Core, combined with replacing Calculus with probability and statistics as the capstone to high school mathematics for most students, would be an improvement on much of what we're currently doing, I'm still not sure whether teaching Algebra as a separate course is the best way to accomplish it - even for that small subset of our student population that is passionate about math and science.






Can we find a way to have students whose passion is math and science explore rich, meaningful mathematics that isn't divided up into courses (Algebra), semesters (first semester linear, second semester non-linear), and units (Chapter 5: Writing Linear Equations)? Can we do this in a meaningful way for all students, even those who currently don't have a passion for math and science? Can we do it in a mathematically coherent way that doesn't impact a student's ability to progress to higher-level mathematical thinking should they choose to do that? Can we do this within a system that - at its heart - is an assembly-line model designed to mass produce a fairly standard product?

I think this is essentially what Dean - and many of us - are asking ourselves. Is there a way to combine the best of both? The best of passion-based learning and a liberal arts education that exposes students to some "standard" body of knowledge that we believe all people should be exposed to. Can the current system - with all its flaws and all its successes - adapt to a personalized, on-demand, anytime, anywhere learning environment? Or do we have to start over with a system that is designed to meet the needs of the learner and one that - at its heart - is antithetical to a standards-based system?

I honestly don't know. Because while I do believe the current system is designed to meet the needs of a rather small portion of our students, I'm not sure I can clearly define what mathematics education would look like in such a new system. As I stated in a previous post, I believe we can have high standards without standardization, yet like Dean I struggle to envision exactly what that looks like in practice in any kind of systemic way.

So, do you believe in Algebra as a separate course/body of study in high school? Or, like the tooth fairy, is Algebra - and standards-based, one-size-fits-all education - something we should've outgrown by now?

What Will You Share Today?

Dean says it so well in his K12Online Preconference Keynote. This is worth 25 minutes of your time. Really.

If learning shouldn't be confined to the four walls of your classroom, should teaching? Why would we hoard good teaching and learning?

What did I share today? Well, at 6 am my time I Skyped for about 25 minutes with Sharon Peter's students in Mozambique - they had some questions for me. Then I Skyped for about 5 minutes with some teachers in Florida about Skype - they just got it opened up through their filter.

Then I went to school.

It Is What We Make of It

This is going to be a somewhat eclectic post, with no real insight or conclusion from me (yes, I know, I know), but I think that there are some connections here that perhaps somebody (or even my future self) can make. There also could be nothing at all here, but I think the links are interesting in and of themselves even if there is no real connection or higher meaning.

Thanks to an email from one of my school board members, I ran across this article at the Washington Post:

The 44-year-old North Bethesda resident desperately wants a restaurant here that caters to the raw food diet, which prescribes only fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and sprouts, none of which have been heated above 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Over the past year, she has dedicated as many as 10 hours each month to attending meetings, sharing her ideas on a community Web site and creating raw food treats such as oat-hemp balls to persuade others of the virtues of raw food.

One thing Greenspan hasn't had to contribute is cash, a key element in getting new restaurants up and running. That's because the model for Elements is unlike any other Washington restaurant, and, as far as the founders can say, unlike any other restaurant in the world. If it successfully opens, Elements will be the first "crowdsourced" restaurant, conceived and developed by an open community of experts and interested parties.

So a group of like-minded folks use technology to come together to try to achieve a goal.

. . . "Most businesses are started because you have a great idea, and you take it out to the public to see if they like it," says Linda Welch, 49, the Washington businesswoman who launched and is funding the Elements project. "This is the opposite. We're finding out what people want and doing it."

They gather information from their stakeholders (and, in fact, are stakeholders themselves), to try to develop a product that meets the stakeholders’ needs.

. . . "It's the community. What's rewarding is coming together to create a place in the city that's beneficial to the community and yourself and your friends."

To paraphrase: It’s about the community, stupid.

. . . Characteristically, the group is optimistic. "It's not crazy to do if you have an established, loyal customer base," Takemoto says. "What's crazy is to open a business from scratch."

Again, to paraphrase: What’s crazy is not to use these tools and this ability to organize.

This seems to tie in well with Clay Shirky’s ideas about group forming and group action. It also reminds me a bit of this “group action to make a difference” video that I ran across at Dean Shareski’s blog. As Dean says,

This is the type of thing that illustrates the ability to be proactive . . . I’m looking forward to seeing passionate, connected teachers leading students in group formation that changes our world.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

As Dean says in the comments to that post, “We only need a few motivated people to lead and the ease of organization can make it happen.”

It also reminds me of James Surowiecki’s keynote at NECC, which is only available for viewing by ISTE members, but everyone can view an excerpt.

Under the right conditions, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent.

So we should be figuring out – and providing – those conditions. What might those conditions be?

You need some method of aggregation.

You need a diverse group of people.

You need independent thinking. You want people to rely on their own information, their own intuition, their own knowledge. You want people to bring something to the table other than what everyone else around them is bringing to the table.

Hmm, sounds like a well-developed, diverse, and active Personal Learning Network.

Finally, it seems to connect for me (somehow, not quite sure how yet) to this presentation by Michael Wesch at the Library of Congress. Wesch, in relation to the YouTube community, talks about ideas including “user generated filtering” and “user generated organization,” and how as “media change, human relations change.” Towards the end he states, “It is not just what you make of it, it is what we make of it.” (He's now posted the full text of his poem, inspired by Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.)




So, how does this tie all together? As I stated at the top, I’m not sure I know. But I think it’s something along the lines of:

Technology is changing us. Us, the human race. It’s changing how we form communities and interact. It’s empowering individuals, yet in a powerfully group-oriented, networked way (“networked individualism” - sounds like an oxymoron, but I'm not sure it is). As educators, we need to delve into the “ridiculously easy group formation,” pull from the wisdom of our diverse stakeholders, and help discover and provide the conditions necessary for our students to leverage the power of aggregation. It truly can be what we make of it, if only we choose to try.

Or something like that.

Or not at all like that.

Like I said, I’m not sure how these all connect, I just have this strong feeling that they do. And if we can tease out those connections, it can have some powerful implications for the way we teach and learn.

What do you make of it?