I found this TED Talk by Susan Etlinger to be interesting in and of itself, so I think it's worth 12 minutes of your time. Several of the things she said really resonated with me, so I'll discuss them briefly after you watch.
At just past the one-minute mark, she says:
We have to ask questions, and hard questions, to move past counting things to understanding them.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted
but I sorta like this one better. Because counting things is often a good thing but we can't stop there, we have to provide the context, the understanding, the wisdom to do something good with what we've counted. At about the 6:30 mark, she says,
this is what happens when assessmentsand analytics overvalue one metric —in this case, verbal communication —and undervalue others, such
as creative problem-solving
This sums up my main objection to PISA/PARCC/CMAS/fill in your own state test. We're so proud of ourselves for coming up with the metric that we've stopped asking ourselves whether it's an important metric in the first place. (I just finished Yong Zhao's new book where he goes into great detail discussing the history of education in China, and why the PISA results - and especially the conclusions assigned to those results - are almost meaningless.) We are overvaluing a metric that may (or may not) show how well you will do in school, but has very little worth in determining how well you will do in life.
At about 8:20, she brings it home,
And at this point, you might be thinking,"Okay, Susan, we get it,you can take data, you can
make it mean anything."And this is true, it's absolutely true,but the challenge is thatwe have this opportunityto try to make meaning out of it ourselves,because frankly, data doesn't
create meaning. We do.So as businesspeople, as consumers,as patients, as citizens,we have a responsibility, I think,to spend more timefocusing on our critical thinking skills.Why?Because at this point in our history, as we've heardmany times over,we can process exabytes of dataat lightning speed,and we have the potential to make bad decisionsfar more quickly, efficiently,and with far greater impact than we did in the past.Great, right?And so what we need to do insteadis spend a little bit more timeon things like the humanitiesand sociology, and the social sciences,rhetoric, philosophy, ethics,because they give us context that is so importantfor big data, and becausethey help us become better critical thinkers. (emphasis mine)
At various time in my life I've taught students mathematics, so in some ways I'm a big fan of data. But the mistake we've made (and are currently doubling-down on with our new state tests) is confusing data with meaning. Data is only as good as the questions you ask, the way you ask them, the way you collect it, and - critically - how you then interpret the data. Or, as Susan says at about 10:40,
if I don't know what steps you took,I don't know what steps you didn't take,and if I don't know what questions you asked,I don't know what questions you didn't ask
In education we currently have a love affair with data, without bothering to ask whether the questions we're asking are the right ones, or the only ones.
Data doesn't create meaning. We do.
Data doesn't define learning. We do. Or at least we should.
NextJump - Lifetime Employment. Note their home page:
Barry-Wehmiller Companies - Everyone took time off instead of laying people off. Note their home page:
For me, the key message in this talk was about trust. We need to trust our leaders. More importantly, our leaders need to trust us. I think that may be one of the two or three core problems in education right now.
No one trusts anyone. In fact, we don't even trust ourselves. From the talk:
What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, "Why would you do it? Why did you do it?" And they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. I can't simply say to you, "Trust me," and you will. I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will. It's not how it works. It's a feeling.
Isn't that the organization we'd all like to work in? Isn't that the educational system that would be the most effective for our students?
This isn't new information, but this TED Talk on the neuroscience of sleep is particularly timely now that school is back in session. Sleep is not only necessary for health reasons, but for learning reasons, which is why schools (and parents, and students) should pay a bit more attention to the science of sleep.
If you want to learn more about sleep, here are some interesting links. No word yet on whether LPS is considering starting high school at a more reasonable, science-based start time of perhaps 9:15 instead of 7:21. And, yes, if you're a teenager and not getting at least 9 hours of sleep a night, you're damaging your health and your learning.
I just posted this on my Algebra Class Blog, but thought some folks here might be interested in it as well.
If you have about 6 minutes, I think you might find this video worth your while. I think he shares a great message about the impact you can have on others' lives - often without even realizing it.
So what do you think, do you want to try to be an everyday leader? Can you create a lollipop moment today?
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.
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.)
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?
I'm not going to say too much about this other than I'm just going to pull a few quotes from this to ponder.
Crowd accelerated innovation. (Or, perhaps Crowd Accelerated Innovation, deserving of capital letters?)
It's the crowd, that shines the light, and fuels the desire . . .This is a model that pretty much any organization could use to nurture its own cycle of crowd accelerated innovation . . . Invite the crowd, let in the light, and dial up the desire. (Schools? Education? Individuals? Learning?)
You have to show your stuff to the world . . . Radical openness. (Radical. Openness. Is there anything more unlike what most schools/classrooms look like today? And do we think programs like Race to the Top are going to make things more open, more collaborative? Or less?)
We’re a social species. We spark off one another. (Oy. Back to the drawing board for my Algebra class. I have to do better.)
We watch 80 million hours of YouTube every day . .. Cisco predicts that in 4 years, more than 90% of the web will be video. (And more video has been uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than has been broadcast by ABC, NBC and CBS combined since ABC started broadcasting . . . in 1948.)
It’s in that non-verbal portion, there’s some serious magic. (I like to think my writing is sometimes good, and I don't think anyone is saying that writing is going away, but he has a point.)
Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face to face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution . . . This is the connective tissue of the human super-organism in action. (I have to think about the idea of "connective tissue" a little bit more, but shades of Clay Shirky here - both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus.)
Print scaled. The world’s ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide. . . But now, in the blink of the eye, the game has changed again. . . . what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can do for face to face communication . . . that primal medium which your brain is exquisitely wired for just went global. (Wow. Shades of both Shirky and Steven Johnson here.)
For the first time in human history talented students don’t have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. (I, of course, don't love that line, but I get the point. I would say it more like, "For the first time in human history talented learners don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy circumstances," but, yeah, okay. Also see Disrupting Class.)
Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. ('Nuff said.)
This TED Talk by Seth Godin is worth 17 minutes of your time. After you watch it, some thoughts are below the embed.
Here are a few semi-random thoughts that were generated by this talk. I’m not saying that he’s necessarily right about everything, but he raises some interesting questions that are worth thinking about.
What do I do for a living? Seems like a simple question, but – as Seth Godin points out – perhaps it’s not. I used to answer, “I’m a math teacher” or “I teach math.” Over time that shifted to “I teach students math” and then simply “I teach students.” But I find myself agreeing with him that perhaps that’s too “narrow” of a definition of what we in education try to do: we try to change everything.
Every day we should at least try to step on that light bulb, clearly indicating that there was “before,” and now there’s “after;” that at this moment in time we changed something in our students’ lives. If we don’t aspire to that, if we accept a too-narrow definition of what we do for a living, then we relegate ourselves to mediocrity.
Godin says that the way we make change is by leading, and that leading is simply helping to connect people and ideas. And, at this moment in time, we are at a tipping point (dare I say a moment of “shift”), because the technology allows us to connect in ways that previously were unimaginable or impractical (see Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody). And we can find others that are interested in and passionate about the same things, not by forcing them, but because we want to be connected. We need to be connecting as educators and, just as importantly, we need to be helping our students connect.
He goes on to say that we need to find folks that are disconnected, but already have a yearning; people who are just waiting for someone to lead them. (Sound like anyone you know?) We need to be heretics, who look at the status quo and say, “I can’t abide it.” (What’s wrong with the status quo? Unless you don’t see any need in the world, any disaffection, any hurt or disconnectedness, then we must try to improve on the status quo.) Is this in your curriculum? Perhaps not in so many words, but it should be, so I’m asking you to add it. Right now.
Godin then says there are three questions to ask yourself if you’re trying to lead something. If educators are leaders, then we need to ask ourselves these same questions.
Who are you upsetting? If you’re not upsetting anyone, then you’re not changing the status quo. (Note that this is not upsetting people just to upset them, but rather with a purpose, with a goal, with an important change in mind that’s necessary to improve things for someone. Editor’s note: I’ve got this one nailed. Unfortunately, I don’t think it stands on its own.)
Who are you connecting? (Think outside your classroom walls for a moment here. Nothing wrong with connecting inside your classroom, but some of those students have yearnings that don’t match up with others in their classroom, so help them find their tribe.)
Who are you leading? (Don’t limit this to the students in your classroom, or the adults in your building/department; leading is not limited by proximity or geography anymore. Also some folks will protest that they don’t want to lead or that’s not in their job description. I say it should be, and I’d ask you to add it now.)
Godin concludes by asking his audience to create a movement, to find their tribe. So, what are you waiting for?
This definitely qualifies as "unconfirmed," but it's highly intriguing nonetheless. According to this post on GamePolitics.com (Where politics and video games collide) (via a tweet by Andy Blanco):
We've only gotten one report of this, which seems a bit odd, but an Xbox Live gamer who goes by Dragunov765 has posted photos of what appear to be in-game ads for Barack Obama.
Dragunov (we know his real name, too) says he came across the ads while playing Burnout Paradise earlier this week . . .
Its veracity aside, the virtual billboard raises an interesting question: Are political ads in video games a good idea? In terms of eyeballs, I’d have to say yes. Roughly one-third of American households own an Xbox 360, Sony PS3 or Nintendo Wii. In terms of effectiveness, Brandweek recently detailed a survey undertaken by its fellow Nielsen Games division in which 11 percent of gamers said they bought a brand after seeing it advertised in a game.
Some folks will ask how effective this is when so many gamers can't even vote yet. While there are many gamers that aren't yet 18, the average age of gamers is 30, and 37-year-olds buy the most games (as of February 2006 according to David Perry in this TED talk, statistics at about the four minute mark).
When the historians write the history of this election, how big of a feature role will technology have? Internet fundraising and recruiting. YouTube (Obama Girl, clinging to guns and religion, Reverend Wright, a more perfect union, Tina Fey, . . .). Email organizing, energizing, pushing the current campaign message, and rapid response. Social networking and community building. Voter registration. To name just a few aspects.
Meanwhile, back here in K-12 Land . . .
Update 10-14-08: Thanks to BenH in the comments, this story is now confirmed.
