Tag: blended learning

Is this the future of learning?

Posted on | by Sam

It comes from the Fullerton (CA) School District, which has developed “epic storylines” and a gamification around core skills in order to make learning more technologically integrated, experiential, and fun.

It also looks and feels very different from the sort of educational experiences almost anyone above a certain age has ever had. Is that a good thing, or does an approach like this take us too far from the tried and true backbone of what teaching and learning has always looked like — and should continue to look like into the foreseeable future?

Is it time for schools to rethink, well, time?

Posted on | by Sam

On a recent weekday morning in Washington D.C., several hundred teenagers hurriedly made their way through their high school’s hallways in a frantic effort to get to class on time.

I know – nothing new there. Except that in this particular school, the hallways had ubiquitous electronic clocks that measured time in bright red numerals down to the second, and these particular students had just three minutes to move from one class to another. “They had five minutes last year,” principal Caroline Hill told me, in between passionate exhortations for her students to keep moving. “And it was a complete waste of time.”

Admittedly, Hill – the founding principal of the E.L. Haynes Charter High School – is a little time-obsessed. That’s because she’s also obsessed with making sure that the most timeless experience in American public life – the school day – jettison its anachronistic habits and enter the modern age. “We can’t transform school,” she continued, “until we transform the way we think about time and its relationship to learning.”

Ostensibly, Hill’s school is as good a place as any to try to bring about such a mindshift. One of D.C.’s most sought after public options, the Haynes high school building reflects a mixture of traditional and innovative roots. Formerly a neighborhood public school until it was closed in 2008, Haynes secured the right to the building a year later, in 2009, and launched an ambitious renovation plan soon after. The end result is a $25 million, space capsule-style addition to the original building – and more than 46,000 additional square feet. The main entrance opens onto a sun-filled atrium that feels more like a university student center than a high school. And although the pace of the day still feels a lot like the high school you and your parents (and your grandparents) probably attended – with classes in fifty-minute increments, spread across a seven-hour day – what happens during those classes feels a lot different. That’s because E.L. Haynes is determined to rethink the two most important parts of the high school experience: ninth grade, and the way students start; and twelfth grade, and the way they finish. “And what we’re learning,” Hill told me, “is that in order for those experiences to be meaningfully different, adults and young people first need to completely rethink what it means to be a teacher or a student.”

Hill’s interest in reimagining the entry and exit points for her students was piqued shortly after the school welcomed its first group of ninth graders. “We had assumed that all of our high school kids would come directly from our lower school,” she explained, “but three-fourths of them were coming from other schools across the city, which meant the skill-levels and expectations each student had about what school was about were all over the map. Meanwhile, our ninth grade was structured as this typical one-size-fits-all experience, regardless of where the kids were at individually.”

Hill and her faculty quickly decided that if they wanted to ensure that all students were ready for life after high school, they had to get serious about closing those gaps. “And it’s really hard to create a more personalized high school experience when you have constraints on time and talent, and all these pieces that say you have to do ‘school’ a certain way.”

In particular, Hill means a timeworn way of thinking about school in which, simply put, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. Typically, American schools are structured this way, such that if a student doesn’t master the material presented in the allocated time, he or she fails the unit, the class marches on, and whatever skills or information were supposed to be acquired simply get left behind. Sound familiar?

But Haynes and a growing number of other schools around the country are trying to flip the script by making learning the constant, and time the variable. “If we’re not willing to have a revolving door on our talent and our students, then something’s going to have to change in the way we do ‘school,’” she said. “Why not, on the first day, give students everything they need to succeed, as opposed to this lesson today, and that book tomorrow. Instead, say these are the books we’re going to read this year. Here. Have them. These are the lessons and models we’re going to do in math. Here. Have them. And then spend the rest of your time tending to individual needs and letting everyone proceed at their own pace.”

Of course, that sort of culture shift is easier said than done. American schools have conferred degrees based on Andrew Carnegie’s century-old notion of the “Carnegie Unit” – aka the credit hour – for generations. This is especially ironic since the Carnegie Unit was never supposed to be a measure of learning; instead, its original purpose was simply to measure how much teachers were working, as a way to differentiate high school from college – and as a method for determining teacher pensions. If learning is to replace time as the constant, however, our methods for evaluating each individual’s learning must become much more nuanced and precise. And yet once again, time looms large. As Lee Shulman, president emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, puts it: “The reason students fail . . . is not that they’re not smart. It’s that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them.

“Learning should never result in a normal curve,” Shulman argues. “It should result in a kind of ‘J curve’ in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.”

I saw firsthand what this looks like after entering Shane Donovan’s ninth grade physics class. An early adopter of this approach, Donovan received the Citybridge Foundation’s Education Innovation Fellowship, a yearlong program that introduces teachers to promising innovations in personalized learning, as well as the chance to pilot personalized learning models in their schools. While Donovan surfed the room, his students – all but two of who are either designated as special-needs learners, or English-language-learners, or both – worked in small clusters based on whichever standard in the curriculum they were working on.

Occasionally, Donovan would address the entire room, but it was only to remind them to monitor their own needs. “If you’re not done with Standard Seven by the end of the period,” he bellowed at one point, “you have homework. If it’s just a matter of time, finish it on your own. But if you’re stuck, come find me so you can get yourself unstuck.”

Donovan is bouncy and bound, with glasses, a lanyard around his neck, and rolled-up sleeves. After the period ends, I asked him what it takes to run a class this way. “I spent the summer making screencasts of all the traditional lectures I would have to give this year,” he said, “but the hardest part has been learning to let go so I can let the kids do, without the typical minute-to-minute feedback.

“For me,” he continued, “the important question was not how to make school self-paced; it was how to stop getting crappy projects that didn’t show depth of understanding. How can we shift what we do as adults so that if kids are doing assessments, they’re doing them well?”

Since making that shift, Donovan says something surprising emerged: a much clearer demonstration of high-impact life skills that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with physics – skills like learning how to organize your time, keep track of your own progress, and get help when you need it, but not before. “I’ve come to believe that the most important thing happening here isn’t the physics; it’s them understanding how to correct their own mistakes. We still have kids who are always pressing the ejector seat – ‘I need a teacher! I need a teacher!’ – but it’s much easier now to see who got it and who didn’t, and who knows how to organize their time, and who doesn’t.”

That transparency is key for the school’s plans to reimagine twelfth grade as well. “We need to teach our students how to work with independent time,” Hill explained.  “If they’re flailing with us, that’s a gift, because it means we still have some time to teach them how to manage their time before they leave us and have to do it on their own. It’s like peeling back an extra layer of the onion.”

Donovan agrees, and is surprised by how much it’s changed the way he thinks about teaching. “In a way, I don’t really care how much physics they learn,” he admitted. “I want them to learn how to correct their own mistakes. That can make it harder – to see kids struggle – but if our boys don’t graduate, we know what the statistics tell us will await them. So helping them learn how to struggle and become more self-aware matters much more than, say, Standard Twelve in the ninth grade Physics curriculum.

“To teach this way is definitely messy and weird,” Donovan said while welcoming his next group of students into class. “And I’m definitely never going back.”

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign

Posted on | by Sam

Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame.

“I had my heart set on being a forensic psychologist,” she told me recently, amidst the busy midday shuffle of downtown Washington, D.C. “Then I felt what it was like to be part of a place that was changing people’s lives. And I decided I wanted to keep being that person.”

Eleven years later, Dixon has become that person for scores of young men and women at the Wheatley Education Campus in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad. In that time, she’d observed that the stereotype of how teachers spend their summer – a.k.a seventy-seven consecutive Saturdays – never corresponded to the reality of her and her colleagues. “Summer is always the time for reflection, for the research you can’t always complete during the year, and for doing the work you have to do to make the next year even better than the last.”

This year, however, Tanesha Dixon is still waiting for her first moment of summer respite. “Every day,” she confessed wearily, “I work all day, go home, eat something, and then work until three in the morning. I feel like I’m building Rome and the road to it, simultaneously.”

Tanesha’s principal at Wheatley, Scott Cartland, knows what she’s talking about. Six years ago, his first summer at the school coincided with the DC government’s decision to install military-like checkpoints throughout Trinidad to try and stop a spate of murders. He remembers well the first school assembly he tried to organize that September. “We couldn’t get the crowd quiet enough to say anything,” he recalled. “Security guards were chasing kids around the aisles, other kids were screaming – it was complete chaos. You realize you’re outnumbered, and the kids don’t know you or trust you. We were in for a long year.”

Since then, with the help of teachers like Dixon, Cartland had helped engineer an impressive culture shift at Wheatley. But even though crucial factors like trust, attendance and student achievement had risen considerably, “it still wasn’t fast enough. Most of our kids don’t have a lot of social supports in their lives, so it’s especially important here that they start to really assume control of their own learning. And dragging a whole class of kids through the same curriculum over an entire school year clearly ain’t the way.”

For educators like Cartland and Dixon, then, the conclusion was clear: summer could no longer be the place to reflect on how to get better in a system that was never going to meet the needs of all their kids. It had to become the laboratory for something radical – a complete redesign of the structure and purpose of schooling. “What we decided,” Cartland told me, “was that the best place to start was by shifting toward a competency-based model of learning, and putting every kid in a position to be able to determine their own pace and progress, all year long.”

Although the phrase hasn’t entered mainstream conversation, “competency education” is on the mind of lots of educators and policymakers. It emerged out of the logic that if you want to make learning more personalized, you can’t continue to assign credit hours to students based on Industrial-era notions like “seat time” or “Carnegie Units.” In response, a growing number of schools and states are starting to organize learning not by credit hours, but by competencies – or the extent to which a student can demonstrably transfer knowledge and skills in and across content areas. In such an environment, each student is allowed to move through a curriculum at his or her own pace, and no one moves on until s/he can demonstrate mastery of the core concepts.

“To do that well,” Cartland explained, “a school like ours has to rethink just about everything – from grades to tests to professional development to the structure of the school day.” And to do that at all, Dixon adds, requires a reorientation that calls into question just about everything that she and her colleagues find most familiar about their chosen profession. “Some days I feel like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future,” she confessed. “I’m in my DeLorean, and it’s the 1950s again, and I’m fighting Biff. But the future is now. We have more people coming out of DC with HIV than we do with four-year degrees. We have to be courageous enough to hold up a mirror and describe what we see. And if we’re being honest, I think we have to conclude that the whole way we do school is wrong. Teaching to the middle is wrong. Moving kids through the same curriculum at the same pace is wrong.

“Educators today have a choice to make: are we willing to be like those early civil rights activists who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or do we want to stand and observe from a safe distance so we can run when the cops come? I understand where the impulse to protect oneself comes from. I feel it, too. But this is what it means to be a teacher today, and we need to be accept the challenge of behaving in some very different ways.”

I saw evidence of Tanesha’s claims recently during a two-day workshop for her school and five others in DC – a mixture of existing neighborhood schools like Wheatley, and new charter schools that haven’t yet opened their doors. Each school had received a grant from the Citybridge Foundation (full disclosure: Citybridge has asked me to write a series of articles about school reform issues in DC) to reimagine its school in ways that make learning more personalized for each student. “The best and worst feature of competency education is that it never looks the same,” explained Rose Colby, a national expert on the subject who kicked off the meeting. “But let’s begin by letting you all share your most pressing questions or wonders.”

Scott Cartland raised his hand first. “At Wheatley, we’re struggling to design the right performance tasks for kids, and we’re wondering how we’re going to be grouping kids and allocating time. This model requires a much more open-ended system, and we’re still working in the old model, which breaks the day into lots of periods but pushes kids through that day in rigid groups.”

“At some point,” Rose replied, “we have to acknowledge that tweaking the old schedule won’t really work. The only way forward is to begin by thinking about what kids need, and then aligning everything to flow from that.”

Every night, late into the night, that’s exactly what Tanesha Dixon is trying to do. “We’ve built systems of curriculum that are basically grade-based and fixed. Starting this fall with our 6th graders, we’re going to try and do the opposite: to lay down the entire curriculum at the start of the year, and let kids move through it at their own pace. But meanwhile the education world is obsessed with standards, and the switch to the Common Core.”

Dixon took a deep breath. “The thing is, standards are not competencies – they don’t rise to an equal weight. Competencies are the transfer; they’re the performance component that bundles lots of standards together into one demonstrable concept. It’s big. It’s right. And I like that at Wheatley we’re not shying away from the challenge – but some days I wonder how we can pull off such a massive shift when so much of the old way of thinking about all this remains in the minds of so many.”

Cartland agrees. “Right now, I feel like everything we’ve done has been one giant sprint to the starting line. The summer has been invaluable. But this fall is when the real work will begin. That’s when we’ll find out if it was all worthwhile.”

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)