My Ed Hero #4 – Gary Stager

Gary Stager first blipped onto my radar screen at NECC 2009.  He was standing on a big stage, in a big room, talking about contructivism and education.  But more than that he was espousing his views about bad education, bad ideas, and young upstart presenters, who he thinks should sit down and listen to the seasoned experts.  He was straight shooting and articulate, but also a bit bombastic and harshly unapologetic, but I loved it.  I have the highest level of respect not for the people who I 100% agree with, but rather for those who have powerful ideas, backed by powerful evidence, who are willing to challenge the powers that be, or any one else, with the intentions of making the world a better place.  I think that description describes Gary Stager perfectly.  He doesn’t pull any punches, and he’ll challenge the biggest names in education.  But he does this because he has had extensive experience and done extensive research and has a lot to back up the claims that he makes.  Gary Stager is My Ed Hero #4 because he frustrates me, he challenges me, but in the end he makes me a better educator.

So who is Gary Stager?  If you don’t know him already, he’s a progressive educator who has a website, a blog, and a gathering, Constructing Modern Knowledge, that he supports in addition to his many other endeavors.  He’s also the executive director of the Constructivist Consortium, he’s a contributor to the Huffington Post, and he’s probably the biggest devotee in the entire world to the work and the person of Seymour Papert.  I shouldn’t put words in his mouth but if I were to describe what I see as his mission in life, I would say that it is to reinvent the whole educational monster around the ideas and values that progressive educators  have shared for decades, maybe centuries (got to get Dewey in there).  That is, education should be child-centered, constructivist, democratic, empowering, and engaging.  It should encourage learners to think creatively, critically, analytically to solve problems, to create, to discover, and more.

“Okay, so he sounds like a pretty great guy, but what effect has he had on you?” you might be asking (maybe you aren’t wondering that, but play along).  Well do you remember at the beginning of this piece I mentioned that he was putting young upstart presenters in their place at NECC 2009?  Well, at the time, I was a young upstart presenter.  I presented at the Computer Using Educators conference for the first time in 2009.  So I felt like he was telling me to sit down, and this made me uncomfortable.  I could definitely understand where Gary was coming from.  There have been so many thinkers and educators who have had valuable and critical things to say.  And despite having these ideas as part of our collective body of knowledge, they are yet to be truly taken to heart and implemented.  At the time I knew something about historical and contemporary perspectives on education, but there was definitely so much for me to learn.  Despite coloring at the cheeks a bit and sending my mind racing to justify my existence as a young upstart presenter, I think he was right.  I needed to do some soul searching and look backwards at the significant figures of the past and look around me at what is being said today by those with the most relevant and important experience.  This has prompted me to examine my educational roots quite a bit more and is a big part of why I want to pay homage to My Ed Heroes.  I think this one example of Gary Stager’s effect on me is a perfect illustration of constructivism at work.  You need to be challenged and experience cognitive dissonance in order to significantly reorganize your cognitive schema, your understanding of the world and take a leap forward.

This is just one example of Gary’s influence on me as an educator.  It really goes far beyond this initial experience.  I definitely dig constructivism and enjoy hearing him share his ideas at conferences and on the Future of Education podcast and in other places.  I also have started to chip away at his reading list for serious reformers.  Someday I hope to be able to attend Constructing Modern Knowledge. Heck, I’d like to meet the guy and have a conversation.  What I like most about Gary Stager is that although I agree with him about so many things, I disagree with him too.  It doesn’t make me admire him less that I disagree with him.  I like to be challenged.  When I find that I disagree with him, I am pushed to re-examine my rationale for my belief.  Sometimes I change my mind and find that I think he’s right and sometimes I decide that I still disagree.  It is the dialogue, the critical discourse, and the flexing of mental muscle that continues to change me as an educator and as a person generally.  It is something that I value immensely.  For that, I thank you, Gary Stager.  I look forward to continuing to be challenged by you.  And if I do every meet you and get to have a conversation I won’t just say I’m a huge fan (although I probably will say that).  I also have a few bones to pick with you.  But regardless keep being the arms swinging educational reformer that you are!

Twitter’s Sleeping On the Couch

Months ago I posted about My Love Affair and Subsequent Breakup with Twitter, and Why We Might Give It Another Go.  This post documented my hot and cold relationship with Twitter, but ended with my hope that we would reconcile.  Twitter and I had a few conversations about boundaries first, spent some time reacquainting ourselves with one another and then enthusiastically launched back into a relationship.

I believe that I gave it my best shot.  But despite some good times, we are taking a break and Twitter is sleeping on the couch.

So allow me to dish a bit about our relationship troubles…

When Twitter and I got back together, we spent a good amount of time together, but not too much time (unlike last time when a lack of boundaries caused our relationship to go sour the first time).  One of the boundaries that I set with Twitter is that there would be clear parameters for our time together.  We would spend time together when I was at work because that was the aspect of Twitter that most attracted me to him (learning about latest trends in education and educational technology).  I set up a number of special searches and hashtags that I followed, rather than just people, so that I could really hone in on the information of interest to me rather than relying on the shotgun approach where information was just shot at you and you had to get what you can.

We had some really intense and special moments; I met some new friends, followed a few conferences from a distance, and read some great articles and blogs that Twitter turned me onto.  Those times were thrilling and certainly reinforced my decision to get back together with Twitter.

But over time I started to realize how much Twitter drew my attention away from the work I could be doing to help improve teaching and learning in my back yard.  Twitter was directing my focus too much to the world around me, and I was back to the head twitching craziness of trying to catch as many tweets as I could as they flashed across my screen.  The more I have researched about the dangers of multi-tasking with technology, the more I realized that Twitter was drastically affecting my productivity at work.  I was having a significantly harder time being the analytic and creative educator that I pride myself to be.

That was just one of the problems.  Twitter also made me feel bad.  Most of the people I follow had thousands of followers, and that made me feel angst because I have very few in comparison.  The angst was caused by the draw of two competing psychological needs, esteem and self-actualization.  On the one hand, having lots of followers would make me feel worthy and interesting, so perhaps I should pursue that goal.  But on the other hand, I wanted to be authentic and only share things on Twitter when I thought they were important.  I didn’t feel like I had enough to share on a daily or even weekly basis that could possibly draw additional followers.  So my desire to be validated and liked ended up losing out to my desire to be authentic and use my time wisely.  I realized that I would much rather be esteemed by my colleagues at work by doing my job well than invest a significant portion of my day to trying to get a follow.  Twitter just couldn’t fulfill my needs.

So Twitter is sleeping on the couch right now.  I can’t outright kick him out and say it’s over.  We really have had some amazing times together.  I think we have just needed our space so that we can find a way to be together in a way that works for both of us.  Now that we’ve had our time apart, we’re just about to go into relationship counseling.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

My Ed Heroes #3 – Bernie Dodge

If you’ve heard of Bernie Dodge, you probably know him as  ”the Webquest guy” and with good reason.   Bernie Dodge is a professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University, and he is the father of the Webquest.  The webquest (often misunderstood, unfortunately) is a model for learning experiences using the internet that are centered around meaningful and engaging tasks.    Though he is thoroughly a techno-geek (and I mean that in the best possible way), what seems to drive his continued work is exploring ways to integrate new technology in the classroom in ways that coax higher level thinking out of the learner and that cultivate the innate desire humans have  to investigate and understand our world.

Although “the Webquest guy” has a much nicer ring to it, I think a better moniker for Bernie is the “the Task guy.” The latter is more expressive of the expanse of work that he has undertaken.  Unfortunately, the word ’task’ tends to have negative connotations, especially when you take a look at variations on the word such as ” this is so tasking” or “she is such a taskmaster” or “staying on task.”  But these negative connotations tend to come from situations where the task is menial and/or boring such as when you are asked to fill out a worksheet by searching a chapter in a book.  In spite of these negative connotations, I think The Task guy is apt because what ultimately defines the quality of learning, whether it uses technology or not, is the task that the student is asked to perform.  And Bernie’s idea of a task is something that is inspired, challenging, and inherently engaging.  It is because his work is about elevating the task that he is, in my mind, The Task Guy.

I’ve been lucky enough to have Bernie as a mentor in several venues.  I’ve heard him speak at conferences but I’ve also taken classes from him at San Diego State.  I’d like to share what I’ve learned from him regarding the notion of ‘task.’

Lessons from Bernie:

Lesson #1:  The Importance of Webquest Tasks:

In a webquest, the task is of utmost importance.  Something I know is particularly vexing to Bernie is when people misunderstand what a webquest is.  The misunderstanding grows out of the conflation of  two ideas:  an internet scavenger hunt that is a collection of websites for a student to poke around in and a webquest that is a roadmap for inquiry centered around a robust task.  Both the internet scavenger hunt and a true webquest ask students to examine websites, but a webquest asks students to use the information and ideas found at these websites to achieve something.  In a webquest, the task determines what it is a student will be doing as they examine sites around the web.  And the task must be authentic, engaging, and require higher order thought.  So if you don’t have a high quality task, you don’t have a webquest.

The success of the webquest task can be gauged by how interested the students are in undertaking the task and how challenging it is (i.e. how much will it require intellectual and creative effort to achieve).  It is because a webquest is about high quality tasks that harness the power of the internet to inform, collaborate, and share that the webquest is a model of instruction that has staying power.

Lesson #2:  The Quality of the Task Depends on the Effect it has on the Cogs of a Student’s Brain

In a presentation Bernie did titled Kids as Deciders, Bernie provides a nice graphic and explanation that illustrated, in simplified terms, the learning process.  Okay, the graphic is a bit Tron-ish, but the idea is great.   Here’s a paraphrase:

You could simplify teaching and learning with a graphic like the one to the left.  The arrow that is stabbing the learner in the eye represents an input.  Inputs (like books, lectures, websites, simulations, movies, etc.) are things that students experience in order to begin to learn about and investigate a strand of learning.  The arrow exiting the students mouth (hopefully not regurgitation but something more meaningful) is the output.  The output is what teachers ask students to produce in order to demonstrate what they have learned.  It could be an exam, a movie, an advertising campaign, a presentation, a concept map, etc.

Ultimately what matters most in teaching and learning is the unseen and invisible  growth, i.e. the flexing of mental muscle, inside the brain of the student.  This is represented in the diagram by the cogs in the head.  How did the gears churn and turn in the student’s mind to process the inputs in order to produce the output?  The churning of the cogs is the learning itself.

So what does this have to do with tasks?  Well, generally the teacher at least in some way determines what output a student will use to demonstrate their learning.  It is the task that the teacher lays before the student that determines how the cogs of the brain will process the information and what the student will produce.

First let’s look at an example from a “webquest.”  I put ‘webquest’ in quotes in the previous sentence because the task in this example would barely qualify it as a webquest, if it does at all.  (See below) The task is simply a scavenger hunt for information that will be regurgitated in a PowerPoint and a brochure.  There is no repurposing of the information.  All students have to do  in order to achieve the described task is find the information and perhaps paraphrase it in a PowerPoint and brochure form.  Essentially they will be taking notes on the topic with a PowerPoint and brochure.  This is using the information at a very low level.  The cogs of the brain simply have to locate the information and summarize/paraphrase it.

Poor Webquest Task

Now let’s modify that task.  Let’s say that students will imagine that they are applying for grant money from the Department of the Interior.  The grant money must be used for disaster preparedness for their hometown.  In their presentation they have to define the dangers related to the type of disaster and generate a plan for improving the city’s readiness for that disaster.  This task would require significantly more flexing of mental muscle.  Presumably they can’t just go to Google and find a disaster preparedness plan for their home town.  They have to CREATE it – the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy – by finding out what happens when that natural disaster strikes, how people protect themselves from it, and what readiness plan may already be in place and how it can be improved in order to make their hometown ready.  They are going to need to piece a lot of information together for a particular purpose.  Furthermore, the presentation they create will need to be persuasive in order to make an adequate case for the grant money.  When they are done, the students have created something of value that probably taught them quite a bit about the natural disaster they focused on.

The lesson here is that a good way to evaluate the quality of a task is to think about what would have to go on inside of a student’s mind in order for it to be achieved.  If the mind doesn’t have to re-purpose, evaluate, or create something with the information, it is likely a poorly designed task.

Lessons #3:  Whenever Possible the Task Should Tap Into Wonder and Natural Curiosity

One of Bernie’s latest endeavors is called WonderPoints.   The idea is to try to resurrect that innate intellectual curiosity that we all had as children.  To refresh your memory of what that was like here are a few questions my four-year-old son asked just in the last few weeks:

• “Where does the gas go?”  (in reference to why we were always filling our car with gas)
• “How did I learn words?  Did you teach me?” (since his little sister is just learning to speak)
• “Why is the water windy?”  (in reference to why we felt a breeze on our hike when we got closer to the Chattahoochee River)
• “Why is it called Chattahoochee?” (interesting answer to this one – I won’t tell, but the picture below provides a clue)

As we get older we take a lot more for granted.  The idea of WonderPoints is to get students wondering about their environment by snapping pictures using mobile devices and documenting what wonder the environment inspired in a map.  In order to encourage the wondering, the student is asked to take a fresh look at the environment as if they were a child or alien seeing it for the first time.

Why do I think wondering is important especially with regard to tasks.  Well, I’ll give a story from my past as an answer to that:

I loved high school biology.  It was one of my favorite classes.  Not only was it challenging, but the teacher created experiences that were inquiry-based; where the task was high level and engaging.  I learned a lot about Biology, and the class inspired me to take Biology as my major in college.

BUT…

Biology seemed to be an interesting but lifeless subject.  Somehow I got the impression that biologists had it all figured out.  I loved learning about Pasteur and genetics and ecosystem dynamics, but these topics weren’t taught as if there were gaps in the scientific understanding.  The information was taught as complete not as if there were interesting questions left unanswered in the field.  To get down to it, the class did not inspire me to WONDER about biology or feel that I could be a part of answering biological questions.

My guess is that I’m not the only person in the world who has experienced this.  A class might be taught well and include well designed and engaging tasks but still not make a student feel that they can participate in the generation of new knowledge in the field – i.e. that their questions and investigation might uncover new truths.

The moral of this story – creating tasks that stimulate students to wonder and ask questions inspires students to investigate their own questions and create new knowledge.  This is often a missing element of coursework.

Why Educators Should Worry More About Tasks

All of the lessons that Bernie taught me about tasks may seem patently clear you.  But my observations of education indicate that although teachers may understand the need for meaningful tasks, it is the transfer of that knowledge to implementation that tends to breakdown – especially when considering the integration of technology.  Prepare  yourself, I’m climbing up on my soapbox:

The reason education has failed to inspire kids is not a lack of engaging technological tools. These are a passing thrill. How excited are people about the original iPad now that the iPad2 is released? If we are simply enticing students to learn by employing the latest technology, it is a cheap thrill.  To paraphrase Gary Stager (who happens to be My Ed Hero #4 and coming up in my next post) technology just seems to amplify the quality of teaching.  It makes bad teachers worse and good teachers better.  That’s because it is the teaching, and more importantly the task students are asked to do during their time with a teacher that defines the quality of learning.  A meaningful and thoroughly engaging lesson can use nothing more than the minds of the student and the skill of the teacher. You can do a really bad lesson in Google Earth and do an incredible one with traditional paper maps or brain power alone. The task is what matters.

If you think about it, what educational/pedagogical value is inherent to new technologies?  Well, I think that ultimately it boils down to a few things that really make them  have value in the classroom:

• Access – 24/7, anywhere, immediate access
• connecting students with people outside of the bounds of their classroom and promoting collaboration
• connecting students with information and elements of the world not available prior to the new technologies
• allowing for creations that have high production value

For example, What is the educational value of a Prezi?

Prezi will not have enduring importance to education.  Neither will VoiceThreads or iMovie or Flickr.  Google docs is just a fancy word processing program that makes documents more accessible and allows for collaboration.  Most likely these tools will soon be replaced and improved upon.  But quality tasks are what we need our teachers to be able to construct, and this will be of never ending importance to the field.  Students will always need to be able to plan, create, evaluate, persuade, propose, design, etc.  Unfortunately too many teachers get things backward.  We spend too much time raving about the power of a tool and not enough time raving about the power of tasks.

And one more thing, just because I feel this cannot be stated enough.  The reorganization of Bloom’s Taxonomy has caused some problems in the education field because the term ‘Create’ is used too generously.  Creating is now at the top of the taxonomy.  However, some educators believe that if a student “creates a movie” or “creates a PowerPoint” that they have asked their students to think at a higher level, but this is not the case.  Neither of these implies that the student created anything with the information. If you are wanting to design an objective that asks students to create, then take the tool out of the equation.  Are they creating a persuasive presentation?  Are they creating a new solution to a problem?  Are they creating a plan?  If you can take the tool out of the equation and the word ‘create’ still makes sense as part of the objective, then it is deserving of this highest rung of Bloom’s.  But if you are having students “create a movie about the types of volcanoes”  taking movie out of the objective makes it nonsensical to say the students are creating anything.  They are Not creating anything with the information about volcanoes that they research.

I thank Bernie for helping me to focus on what the learner is doing (and in particular what they are doing with the target content of the lesson) because, to me, it is the ultimate test of the quality of instruction.

Bloom’s Doom – The misapplication of an important taxonomy

Links to various configurations and descriptions of Bloom’s Taxonomy are frequently tweeted and retweeted and shared in other ways.  This is a testament to the continued relevance of this taxonomy of cognitive complexity.  But not all descriptions or organizations of Bloom’s are created equal – so buyer beware!  Unfortunately so many of them seem completely misguided – at least, they appear nonsensical to me.  What worries me the most is that some of the most erroneous visual guides are the most shared, and to me, that makes them dangerous.

Many educators, myself included, suffer from a technolust that sometimes allows a love affair with a particular tool goad us into forcing a square peg into a round hole.  This happens when teachers use tools because they are new and “shiny” rather than because they are a natural fit for their pedagogical needs.  Another example of a bad fit is the numerous examples of visuals that try to categorize various techno tools in the Bloom’s hierarchy, and there have been a number of them.  Here’s a sampling:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So why do I believe these visuals to be misguided, unhelpful, and even dangerous?  Two reasons.

1.  What’s the point?

When people create guides like this, I wonder to myself what is the point.  How do they envision that teachers will use them.  My best guess is that they would like for teachers to say to themselves, “Hmm, I’d really like to get my students to be thinking at a higher level today – perhaps at the Create level, but I’m just not sure what tool will help them do that.”  And then later…”Aha, if I take a look at this nice diagram I can see that I can pick one of these tools in the Create level of Bloom’s and I’m all set.”

I hope that teachers do not use these diagrams in this way.  It runs counter to what Judi Harris and many others have said about the tool not driving the instruction.  What should drive the instruction is the outcome that you are hoping to attain and the pedagogical approach that will best achieve that end.  This is an almost exactly opposite approach to Harris’ Activity Types where selecting the appropriate technology that will support the learning goals is the last step.

Another way that the creators might envision the use of these charts is that teachers might use them as an argument that their instruction is working students’ minds at a higher order of thinking.  A teacher might their teaching techniques are validated by saying something to the effect of, “How great!  I have my students use wikis and Google sites.  That shows that my students are working at the highest level of cognitive complexity — Create.”  That might be a valid use of these organizers if they were reliable, but I think it is fairly easy to demonstrate that they are not.  Imagine a teacher having students “create” a wiki where it is little more than a research project where students find information and illustrate it with pictures that they find on the web.  If the students do little to digest the information, this would at best reach the understanding level of Bloom’s unless a significant effort is made to organize the information for a purpose.  This brings me to my second criticism of these organizers.

2.  They don’t make sense

Heck they don’t even agree.  In the first image, created by M. Fischer, YouTube is at the bottom Remembering level, and in the second, created by Samantha Penney, YouTube is at the second from the top Evaluate level, and in the third, created by Kathy Schrock, YouTube is at the top Create level.  So what does that mean?  Does that mean two of these people are wrong?  No, they are all right, but they are also all wrong.  They are all right because YouTube could be used at the remembering level if you asked students to watch a YouTube video in order to teach them about who Barack Obama is or what the Challenger disaster was.  It could also be used at the evaluate level if you asked students to critique the accuracy or production value of the final product, but it could also be at the create level if you asked students to create and upload a persuasive video meant to provide a convincing argument for or against unionization.  They are all wrong because they place a tool at a particular level of Bloom’s.  Any tool could fall at any level of Bloom’s, and I challenge you to find a tool that is even mostly used at only one level of Bloom’s.  The tool is basically irrelevant to determining at what level of Bloom’s a tool resides, and this is the most important reason that these organizers should not be made.

In my last post I praised Benjamin Bloom as one of My Ed Hero #2 because his taxonomy is such an important tool, but I also discussed the way that these organizers fundamentally misrepresent what the taxonomy is all about.  It is a hierarchy of cognitive complexity.  It is about what people’s minds do not what features or capabilities a tool has.  It is what is going on inside the head of a child during a task that determines where it falls on Bloom’s.  For example, take Webspiration, a new Inspiration product, that was placed at the Understanding level of Bloom’s on Samantha Penney’s graphic.  On their blog, Inspiration graciously expressed gratitude to Samantha for placing their tool at the Understanding level but went on to explain that the Webspiration tool could be used to encourage students to think at any of the levels of cognitive complexity on Bloom’s taxonomy, and rightly so.  If you have ever used Inspiration, a cursory look at their templates will reveal pre-made diagrams that ask students to analyze, evaluate, etc.  The tool could easily be used to promote any type of thinking on the taxonomy.

Just one more point and then I’ll sum up.  For some reason people recognize the absurdity of classifying non-technology tools and items on Bloom’s.  Where would paper fall?  How about a pencil?  How about a two dimensional paper map?  How about a two-dimensional image?  Just take a look at this website that shows how a single image can be used in activities that promote each level of Bloom’s.  Any of these things, heck even a blade of grass, a bird’s feather, a chair, and more could be used to promote thinking at any level of Bloom’s.  The only thing that determines the level of Bloom’s is the what is happening in the mind of the child, and it is what you ask the student to do with the tool that will determine this.

Please stop making these types of graphics.  They are misleading and unhelpful.  Please stop sharing them.  And if I’m completely wrong about all of this, tell me why these graphics are correct and helpful and I will eat my words.

My Ed Heroes #2 – Benjamin Bloom

Who in the field of education hasn’t heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy?  My guess is that relatively few educators haven’t.  If you’ve heard of the taxonomy and have found it useful in defining the objectives of your teaching, then you are indebted to Benjamin Bloom.

Bloom was a psychologist who is most famous for organizing educational objectives according to their cognitive complexity.  This is, of course, Bloom’s Taxonomy.   Bloom was consumed with investigating thinking and learning.  In fact one of his great hopes was to find a way to replicate the educational results that were achieved through 1 to 1 mastery teaching in the group instructional setting.

Benjamin Bloom is My Ed Hero #2 because the number one pedagogical reform that I would like to see in education is a move toward encouraging students to contend with real-world/authentic problems that elevate their engagement with material to a higher order of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  The habits of mind that Deborah Meier (My Ed Hero #1) places at the center of curriculum are a perfect example.  Each of the habits of mind requires thinking about information that you are presented with in a more sophisticated and important way than simply remembering and understanding it.  Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy provides a simple framework for creating instructional objectives, measuring outcomes, and evaluating the quality of teaching.

To me Bloom’ Taxonomy is the single most important guiding principle in education.  You hear about the taxonomy so much because it is the best structure we have for determining whether a learning task is of high cognitive complexity or not.    What’s disappointing to me though, is that at k-12 schools and institutions of higher learning across the country, instruction is still more often focused on the lower hanging fruit of understanding and remembering.  Bloom’s book introducing the taxonomy was published in 1956.  Despite being a welcome and much discussed guide for designing educational objectives and assessment and despite widespread desire to foster critical thinking, we still, after more than 50 years of having the taxonomy, create instruction as if information was something to dump into students’ brains rather than as something to use in awing and profound ways.

Now there are a lot of guides out there to help teachers consider the taxonomy in their lesson design.  Some of these guides are great and some are fatally flawed.  However, these guides have not proven adequate for promoting widespread higher order instruction.  Why?  I’m not sure.  Could it be:

• they insufficiently communicate how to design lessons that engage the cogs of the brain at a higher level of Bloom’s
• not enough teachers place a high value on developing this type of instruction
• there isn’t enough time built into a teacher’s day to spend developing curriculum that goes beyond the insipid pre-packaged lessons that come with the big bucks districts spend on textbooks
• for some other reason yet to be discovered?

With all of the efforts being spent on education reform, it might be worth taking a moment to investigate why daily lesson plans do not consistently inspire these higher levels of cognition in students.  It is not the case that there aren’t an extraordinary number of teachers that rise to this high standard, because there certainly are.  It is just not as commonplace as one might hope.  But why?  Especially since Bloom’s is common knowledge among educators.

Bloom’s Taxonomy, however, is not perfect.  It’s imperfection lies in how easy it is to misinterpret and misuse.   Using the various guidelines for the taxonomy, a teacher may believe that they are creating a task that requires higher level thinking that doesn’t.  Or equally ineffective, a teacher may create a task that has a  higher level aspect to the task, but the higher order thinking isn’t focused on the concept and ideas that you hope.  Instead, interaction with the concepts remains at a very low level.  Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: The pyramid to the left aligns web 2.0 tools with Bloom’s Taxonomy and was tweeted my way recently.  It seems like a good idea because, in theory, now teachers can select a tool based on the desired cognitive complexity of the task.   Wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy?  Then as long as you are using the tool at the appropriate level of Bloom’s, then you are fostering higher order thinking at that level.

But ultimately it makes no sense.  Each of the items listed in the pyramid are simply tools.  Where would paper fall on the chart?  Nowhere!  Because it is not what tool or implement you are using but how you are using it.  Take Prezi for example.  Based on this chart it is a tool that will have your students working in the highest possible cognitive domain – creating.  But if students are just finding images and information on the web and inserting it into a presentation without much processing, then it is far from being a creative enterprise.  Conversely Flickr is placed at the lowest level as a remembering tool.  But suppose that you have students find pictures on Flickr to illustrate the concept of ‘decay’ or ‘affluence’ or ‘democracy’.  An activity like that would at least be at the analysis level of Bloom’s.

Example 2: I really like this site, so I hate to pick on it.  Someone has made this Bloom’s flip book .  On each page there are descriptions, helpful verbs, and sample activities for each level of Bloom’s.  On the ‘Create’ level it suggests an activity where students create a film about a topic.  What’s interesting about this example is that there is no question that creating a movie will have your students working at a higher level of thinking, but not necessarily about the topic of the movie.  The act of writing a script/creating a storyboard and using movie-making software to edit and organize information so that it effectively communicates and visually stimulates certainly requires thinking at every level of Bloom’s.  The problem is that students can create a beautiful movie and not have to think at a higher level about the content at all.  For example, what if you asked students to make a movie about the types of volcanoes.  Students could simply go online, find out the types of volcanoes, copy a definition/description, download a picture of each, and slap a movie together.  I’ve seen students do exactly that.  In order to have students struggle with the concepts at a higher level, it isn’t what they produce but how the task is framed that matters.  A higher order movie task might ask students to pretend that they work for the department of the interior and create a introductory video for developers who want to build communities near a volcano.   Clearly in this case the students will need to grapple with information related to volcanoes much more significantly.

Example 3: Even relying on the verbs that are often listed as correlating to various levels of Bloom’s can lead to mixed results.  The verb ‘decide’ is placed at the evaluation level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  This makes sense because complex decision-making requires significant thought.  Bernie Dodge has an excellent presentation on the topic of Kids As Deciders (btw – he’s coming up as My Ed Heroes #3 tomorrow).  But a teacher could construct an objective using that verb that does not ask students to think at a higher level.  For example:  ”Students will be able to decide whether an image of a volcano is a cinder cone.”  This objective has a verb that is at the evaluation level, but what students are really doing here is at the understanding or applying level.  The new Bloom’s Taxonomy that places creating at the highest level is sure to lead to misinterpretations.  Whenever the objective is create a…movie, presentation, podcast, etc. and specifies the type of production, you have no guarantee that the task will truly meet any level of Bloom’s beyond understanding.  However, if the task is not tool/product specific and uses the verb create, you are more likely to see better results.  Take the volcano movie above.  If instead you simply asked students to create guidelines for developers who would like to build communities near volcanoes and left the format up to the student, then the creation aspect is squarely placed on the content.

To sum up, I think that Bloom’s Taxonomy is of enormous importance.  If educators truly understand it and strive to create lessons that prod their students to more complex levels of cognition, the employment of the taxonomy would be a great success. But this breakthrough has been around so long and we have still not found a way to utilize the taxonomy effectively, and that is a shame.

Resources (buyer beware – not all of the resources listed at these two sites are created equally, but they are a good start):

Educational Origami’s Bloom’s Taxonomy Resources (and Ed Origami’s Wiki Resources) – I love these

Larry Ferlazzo’s’ Best Resources for Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy

My Ed Heroes #1 – Deborah Meier

For my first post in the My Ed Heroes series, I want to reflect on a person who has brought about a budding resurgence of thought about the mission of education.  This individual is of particular importance to me because although I have never met her, Deborah Meier talked me into becoming an educator.

After college I thought I would become a philosophy professor.  Snoozer I know, but walking home from my philosophy courses struggling with the ideas of identity and other metaphysical questions prodded my brain into a place of challenged uneasiness – that sweet spot of intellectual growth.  I liked it.  If only I could keep my brain challenged by these intractable questions…So I packed up and took my desire to explore new intellectual frontiers to the University of California, San Diego to get a Ph.D. in philosophy.  But at the end of my second year of graduate school at UCSD I had this crazy idea to take an education class.

It happened to be taught by Larry Rosenstock, founder of High Tech High. At first the class made me uncomfortable. He had ideas about education that painted a picture of schooling dramatically different than my experience, and OBVIOUSLY the way I was taught is the right way.  Right?  Larry tossed out ideas that seemed utterly bizarre to me at first. He suggested that high school didn’t have to be constrained by periods with each subject tied up neatly into a time slot. Students could do internships or volunteer during school hours.  Students could grapple with challenges and be asked to create something new.  One story that sticks out for me is that at one of his schools in Boston students in shop classes got credit for physics.  Their calibrated and technical creations impressed physics professors and physics professionals.  That’s right, the kids traditionally considered to be beginning their vocational education were doing college level physics.  Now in the grand tradition of believing that school should be taught in exactly the same way that it was when you were a student, I resisted these ideas. But only at first…

One of the things that pushed me over the edge and ultimately inspired me to believe not only that education should approach its mission differently but that I should be a part of it was reading the assigned book The Power of Their Ideas by Deborah Meier.  It is her belief in the ideals of democratic education, also espoused by John Dewey, that make her one of my educational heroes.

If you aren’t familiar with Deborah Meier, she is a progressive educator who founded several small schools in New York and has written a number of books.  She is also on the board of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES).  Her small schools and work at the CES focus on developing the habits of mind that encourage future intellectual and emotional growth as well as equip students with the cognitive abilities and attitudes that will help them to blossom into an informed and conscientious citizen.  Her goal is to grow schools that not only guide students to be conscientious members of our society but that themselves embody democratic ideals in the governance of the school.

Her influence over me (and many many others) can be summed up with one word:  DEMOCRACY.

It’s been so long since I read her book, but there is much that sticks out to me.  The ideal of democracy that she proposes is two-fold.

1.  Education should prepare students to be active participants in our democratic system – Toward this goal, Deborah Meier focuses on Habits of Mind as a core element of her curriculum rather than stressing the retention of discrete facts.  Ultimately it is the ability to think, analyze, and comprehend that are what lead to educated and responsible citizens rather than whether they can factor quadratic equations.  The original habits of mind are below:

• Evidence: How do we know what’s true and false? What evidence counts? How sure can we be? What makes it credible to us? This includes using the scientific method and more.
• Viewpoint: How else might this look if we stepped into other shoes? If we were looking at it from a different direction? If we had a different history or expectations? This requires the exercise if informed “empathy” and imagination. It required flexibility of mind.
• Connections/Cause and Effect: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? What are the possible consequences?
• Conjecture: Could it have been otherwise? Supposing that? What if ? This habit requires use of imagination as well as knowledge of alternative possibilities. It includes the habits described above.
• Relevance: Does it matter? Who cares?

2.  Schools should be models of democratic decision-making - The idea here is that schools should be collaborative enterprises where grown ups are allies not enemies. Parents, teachers, and students can democratically make decisions related to the operation of the school.    There was no dictator calling all of the shots.  One of the goals of a school of this sort is to gain the trust of students by valuing their ideas and opinions.  Students aren’t incarcerated in a place not their own for a required number of years.

I use the word incarceration cautiously, but it is an inescapable (f)act — aside from a draft army, it’s the only institution that takes away our freedom even though we’ve done nothing wrong.  – Deborah Meier from How Democratic Are Our Schools?

So I got talked into teaching by Deborah Meier.  It turns out that graduate school didn’t prod my brain into that state of discomfort that inspired me to think…it was educational transformation that got those gears cranking.  The unfortunate reality is that most schools achieve neither of the aims listed above.  The real-world of education is what I faced when I first put on my teachers shoes and walked into a classroom.  Too many schools suffer from the contagion of standardized testing delirium and other maladies that plague our schools.  Despite widespread call for change and slow but steady reforms, it may be awhile before schools are transformed, but I’m in it for the long haul.

Why do Deborah Meier’s ideas have staying power? 

• We live in a time where people understand that you can’t truly provide objective news coverage free of bias,but the response to that has led to a wholesale rejection of the idea that you should at least try.  So “News” stations and talk radio have worked hard to convince viewers/listeners not by the strength of the evidence/causal connection but through repetition, fear, and out right misdirection and lying.  So I think that educating students to be able to analyze what they are hearing and seeing (no matter who is the source) should be a key element of the educational charter.  If students graduate from their schooling unable to question and critique and can easily be swayed by the most emotional or fear-based exhortation, then our democracy is in trouble.  Democracies thrive on the marketplace of ideas where arguments are examined on their merits.  They fail when the electorate is easily swayed and bullied and when some ideas are vilified and aren’t even allowed to be presented.  I think all educators should consider the extent to which their curriculum truly does encourage higher order thinking and more importantly what real-world value the transformation that they are hoping to inspire in students will have.
• Secondly, in the spirit of democratic discourse, there is an ongoing discussion in the marketplace of ideas about the future of education.  This debate concerns every facet of the profession from what good teaching looks like, what should be taught, how should teachers be compensated, etc.  One struggle that I have had is that I am torn between two approaches that I can take to this ongoing wrangling about education.  Option 1 – I tell myself that I can sit it out.  No one will listen to what I have to say anyway.  There are so many voices already out there.  They can take care of this.  I can just focus on the small sphere of influence that I have and do the best I can.  Option 2 – I can add my voice to the marketplace of ideas.  I have just as much right to be heard as someone like Bill Gates.  In fact I probably have more of a right to be heard because I have years of experience and dedicated my intellectual study to education.  More importantly there are other voices that have more experience and study than me that should be heard.  Take Gary Stager’s insightful commentary on the meddling of Bill Gates.  I know Bill Gates’ heart is in the right place in wanting to improve education but he is not an expert.  Yet he has the ear of the presidency and the media.   I don’t want the decision-making concerning education to be done over our  heads by an oligarchy of the rich and powerful, the politically motivated, the traditionally entrenched, and the ignorant and uninformed voices that are the loudest and most well-funded.  The habits of mind that Deborah Meier promotes allows people to question dubious claims of cause and effect based on a need for evidence and an understanding of the viewpoint of the individual making the claim (i.e. that unions are the cause of the budget shortfall in Wisconsin – okay, sorry I had to work that in).  Never has it been more important that we not just instill democratic ideals in the children that we teach but that we model the employment of the skills we have developed to influence the debate to the best of our ability.   We as educators will disagree with each other and have to duke out our discussions with the power of our ideas, but we need to join the fight.   Obviously I’m choosing option 2, so like it our not get ready to hear my voice, and I hope that I hear yours.  In fact I hope we disagree (at least a little bit) because that’s more fun anyway.

If you are interested in Deborah Meier she has a continuing exchange with Diane Ravitch called Bridging Differences and she was recently interviewed by Steve Hargadon on the Future of Education Webinar series.

Finding My Voice – A Tribute to My Ed Heroes

The Blonde, the Contrabass & the Microphone #5 from brtsergio's Flickr Photostream (Sergio Bertolini)

On the way to work today, NPR played an interview with Tom Waits in honor of his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  According to Waits, most singers when they start out are just doing bad impersonations of the musicians that inspired them.  At some point he realized he had found his voice.

I remember when I first walked into a classroom in the role of teacher.  I was fortunate to have Tammy Wu, who was teacher of the year for San Diego Unified School District that year, as my master teacher.  There is no question that all I did during my time with her was a bad impersonation of her teaching style.  Then when I had my own classroom I continued to do impersonations of every teacher that I had ever known.  I drew on my high school biology teacher and my college logic professor and every other educator that I admired.  But I was simply using mimicry as a survival skill like a cat teaching her kitten to  hunt.  I didn’t really understand why what I was doing worked or didn’t work, I just followed their lead.   Perhaps I had an intuitive understanding of good teaching, but it hadn’t been developed into a robust and informed understanding despite my years of training.  So at that point I wasn’t an artist in the field of education – more of a paint by numbers prodigy.

Because being good at what I do has always been important to me and because what I do is something that I’m passionate about, I evaluate myself and seek to improve, just as all teachers do who are passionate about their art.   But today I believe that I have found my voice as an educator.  It has only come about because of the influence of my many educational heroes.  So in this blog post I want to introduce a series on my blog where I will highlight one of my ed heroes each day for the next two weeks.  I am indebted to them because the ground they broke and the ideas they have shared have been the most meaningful to me in my development as an educational artist.

Now just because I’ve found my voice does not mean that I am a virtuoso, as they are, or that I won’t continue to be influenced by the ed gurus of the world.  I know that I will.  I look forward to it, but I am at a point where I can critically evaluate what the ed gurus have to offer and integrate the best of their offerings into my own style.  I can educate confidently with more an more success and fewer and fewer fails because they have influenced but not determined my style.

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Notes about the series:

Here’s my plan for the blog posts.  I’ve been reflecting on my educational heroes in response to my new role as an instructional technologist in higher education.  My primary role now is to support college faculty in the integration of technology into teaching.  Although I can certainly help with the nuts and bolts of how technology works, I think my true expertise is entrenched in effective teaching where technology plays a supporting role.  Because I want to create as many opportunities for discussion about teaching generally (and because it is always good to be reminded of your values), I decided to draw pictures of all of my educational heroes with a word below them representing their influence over me (sort of Shepard Fairey style but black and white and drawn without talent).  Once they are posted on my office wall I hope that they will act as conversation starters in my work with faculty and constantly keep me poised to be reflective of my practice.

For each of my next few post, I’ll post a picture of one of my ed heroes and reflect on the influence that the featured individual had in education generally and over my thinking particularly.    If anyone reads these posts, though, I’m curious who your ed heroes are.  Who’s ideas and teachings have done the most to sculpt your teaching philosophy and fuel your passions for education?

Content Standards – Build 2 (Beta)

Channeling my internal edu-ninja to cut through to the heart of what I think we should do

What defines the target that k-12 educators are aiming for?  What defines (in theory, at least) the way that we measure success?

National, State, and Local Standards

Stakeholders despairing that our education system is failing will often look to teaching strategies, class sizes, technology, teacher training/quality, and a host of other variables as flashpoints for ushering in reforms.  While I think that those are worthy areas on which to focus our attention, I believe that ultimately it is the target itself that needs  re-examined and re-defined prior to, or at least in conjunction with, implementing other reforms.

In the TED video below, “How to learn? From mistakes,” Diana Laufenberg provides a nice overview of the relationship of information to the school-house.

In the past students had to go to school because that was were the information was housed.  People at home didn’t have access, so they needed to walk five miles, uphill, in a snow storm to go to school to learn.  Eventually, books and encyclopedias were widely available so the information was a bit more diffuse.  Today information is widely available.  Students can access libraries, museums, and classrooms from anywhere with mobile devices.

If you are wondering what transformation your child should undergo by a year of education at your local public school, look at the standards (usually state standards) that define the target for that grade level’s education.  But state standards are defined based on an old model of how people learn, an old model of information storage, and an old model of how information is organized.

Old model of teaching: The transmission model of teaching saw learning as merely an input process. There is a set of ideas and knowledge in the teacher’s head that just needs transferred to the student’s brain.   So all you need to do to teach is provide the information.  State and other agencies developing standards simply needed to outline what they wanted to see stuck to the brains of students.

California Science Standard - Grade 8

Old model of information storage: Because information was historically not readily available, the focus was on teaching information to the point that it was remembered and understood.  Students would not have access to it later.  So the standards had to make sure that students retained the information and took it with them.  In fact if you look at how standards tend to be stated, they generally begin with “Students know…” as you can see by the 8th grade science standard on Motion from the state of California above.  The standards don’t outline any expected USE of the information.

Old model of information organization: Back in the days of the Dewey decimal system as the main organizational scheme, information was stored in a physical form.  A book or periodical could only be put in one place.  So books were categorized based on broad themes such as science, philosophy, literature, etc.  Where do you put Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?  In science or in philosophy? You had to choose.  Since information was conceived as falling into categories, that is how students were/are instructed as well.  Students take literature, science, math, and history classes.

New model of teaching: Learning is now understood to be a complex cognitive process by which we integrate new knowledge into existing schemas and that many variables affect this process beyond the efforts of the teacher such as prior knowledge, individual aptitudes and preferences, and more.  Furthermore, we better understand now that encoding an understanding of a concept does not entail that a student will be able to use that concept in a situation where it ought to be applied.  If students are only taught information at the remembering or understanding level, it is not necessarily the case that they will be able to use the concept in more sophisticated ways, especially if they are never given the opportunity or prompting to do so.  Nowadays there is a greater push for and emphasis on helping students become critical thinkers and effective problem-solvers, but this desire is not represented very well in standards.

New model of information storage: Nowadays the reality is that information is not just abundant but ubiquitous and often intrusive (case-in-point – my Twitter app jars me every few seconds with a new link, idea, or feeling that someone is sharing).  Since much information is now digitized, we can take it with us wherever we go.  We don’t bother memorizing phone numbers any more – our phones do that for us.  Information is  now available to us whenever we need  it.

New model of information organization: Now that information is stored digitally, it can be tagged and sorted in much more complex ways.  Short stories like the Yellow Wallpaper can be categorized by databases in feminism, literature, psychology, 19th century, and many other categories.  It doesn’t need to be put in a particular information silo, such as literature, where the other relevant features of this story are only novelties or pathways to understanding the piece as literature.  When I used to teach science, at least every once in awhile a student would get indignant that I expected the class to use math to solve problems and conduct experiments.  I would make the point that math exists because of science, commerce, and construction.  It isn’t just an entity unto itself.  Scientists need math.  But the story goes to show that our organization of standards and courses reinforces an antiquated understanding of how to categorize information, namely that information and skills fall into distinct and separate categories.

So what implications does all this have for redefining and reorganizing standards?  Well here’s what I think should happen:

1. Shift the Focus:

Content standards should not be the core outcome of each year of teaching.  Much content is taught one time and it’s use is not reinforced and repeated.  It is a wasted effort to spend our precious time with students in an effort to cram information into their heads.  I think that the standards should define the most important core transformations that we would like to see students make over the entire course of their academic training and that these should be the primary guide for whatever year of school or class subject that they are in.   What counts as the core transformation that students should undergo during their k-12 years is something to be negotiated by stakeholders, but here’s what I would consider core:

• Critical Thinking – be able to critically evaluate, sort, and analyze information – Using information well is more important than remembering it!
• Problem Solving – be able to break down problems, brainstorm, devise solutions, troubleshoot problems
• Collaborative Skills – be able to be good listeners, resolve disagreements, compromise, divide up tasks,
• Creativity – be able to think and express themselves creatively
• Oral, Visual, and Written Communication – be able to communicate both via their own expression and by having the ability to understand and interpret the expression of others
• Technical skills – be able to use various forms of technology as a means toward communicating, solving problems, and creative expression
• Information Literacy – be able to locate information as needed, identify trusted vs. suspect sources, etc.
• Empathy and Citizenship – seeing themselves as members of a global community as well as a country, state, and locality
• Reading – not as a subject but as a skill that is used in every course
• Math – also, not as a subject but as a skill that is used in every course

If a set of core skills, attitudes, and aptitudes are identified and agreed upon, then we can truly measure the growth of the student through time.  Right now our standardized testing is almost exclusively geared toward measuring the retention of a discreet set of facts and skills that will not have continued value for the students.  As I discuss in my previous blog post under problem #4 there is no continued use of much of the standards outlined each year in the content areas.  In eighth grade science a student may “know to interpret graphs of position vs. time” long enough for the assessment at the end of the year, but will the student ever need to know that again?  Will he or she ever be asked to use that skill again?  Realistically, probably not.   But if the main focus of instruction was geared to inspiring thinkers, communicators, creators, etc. then once students start to specialize they can learn the information that they need to do their job well but will have the benefit of their core skills and abilities rather than the current set up where students arrive at college not being particularly good writers or thinkers.

So to sum up, I think that the major focus, what we should be measuring and tracking year to year as students progress through school, should not be the tidbits of information but the important global skills that will have enduring value no matter what goals a student has for the future or what problems they face.  If we shift the focus, then we can truly gauge  progress from year to year based on established rubrics or assessments for measuring student growth.  Wouldn’t it be great if report card from year to year showed trackable, observable progress toward these core goals?  Redefining education standards in this way would go a long way to making it more possible for educators to use an instructional design model as an approach to instruction, as I discussed in my previous two posts.  In addition, it could make the curriculum more meaningful and truly useful to the future success of students.

2.  Keep Content Standards

“Huh?” you may be asking.  “What was all that ranting about tidbits of information and having access to information like never before.  I thought you were going to say that content standards aren’t important.”  Yes, I think we should keep them, but we should re-imagine them.

There are three reasons I think content standards are important, and I’ll use a story to illustrate each one:

Story #1

On the radio I heard an NPR story about Richard Holbrooke being in critical condition before he later died.  The reporter said that doctors had to “fix a tear in the large artery that moves blood from the heart.”  When I heard that I thought, why didn’t they just say ‘aorta’ instead of ‘large artery’?  What this made me realize is that one important reason for content standards is that they provide a foundation for civic dialogue.  There are certain facts, concepts, core values, ideas, etc. that should be ”common knowledge,” as the phrase goes.  In order for us to have a robust civic dialogue, there need to be certain things that we expect everyone to know.  Content standards should be carefully crafted so as to identify those things we need to know as a community.  For example, your average citizen doesn’t need to know huge amounts of detail about the process of photosynthesis, but in order for us to have a dialogue about global warming, CO2 output, and more, everyone should probably know that photosynthesis is a process by which plants take in carbon dioxide and expel oxygen.

Story #2

During the 2010 midterm elections, my jaw dropped when I saw the exchange in the video below between Christine O’Donnell and Chris Coons during their Delaware debate.  It worried me that there was a chance that an individual who displayed ignorance of both our Constitution’s first amendment and the science of evolution could be elected to office.  I wondered why it was that people would vote for someone like this.  Why isn’t their BS detector beeping wildly?  What I realized is that BS detector’s only work if you don’t know something about what someone is talking about.  You need to have some understanding of our nation’s history, the Constitution, and the strong grounding of evolution to recognize that what is going on in this debate is absurd.  If you don’t have that knowledge, it is easy to interpret the video differently.  So in my mind, content standards are critical.

Story #3

This isn’t really a story but rather a general observation.  Some students fall in love with a particular content; it is what makes them tick.  For me the subjects that inspired me were art, science, and philosophy.  For other students it is literature, music, and history.  There are probably infinite combinations of interests that students have.  I think content standards are important because the information will be remembered and valued by those students who truly love that subject/discipline/topic.  I mentioned earlier that most students will never have to look at a distance vs. time graph after 8th grade.  However, those that love physics definitely will.  They will take physics in high school and in college.  Having a foundation in the basics of physics at an early age will be meaningful and of enduring value to those that love it.   I think where we go wrong is expecting that type of information to have meaningful and enduring value for all students.

3. Redefine content standards.

So content standards are important because they are the foundation for much of our civic discourse, allow us to have BS detectors (at least, those are two reasons they are important), and are of keen and enduring value to some students.  But I do not believe that content standards should be formulated as they have been in the past.  How they should be newly conceived should reflect two factors:

1.  Emphasize USE of Content: Since the emphasis no longer has to be on remembering information, content standards can be redefined to reflect that.  The emphasis should no longer be on simply “knowing” information but on its use.  This should be parsed in two ways.  First of all, content standards should not be written using the “Students should know” structure.  One common method for writing objectives, the ABCD method, requires that you indicate a specific behavior.  “Know” is far too vague and does not indicate what you expect students to do or give any guidance in how you would measure success.  Since the standards don’t indicate what students should be able to do with the information, it is difficult for teachers to know what performance they are guiding students to.   For example,

“Students know how to interpret position vs time  graphs and speed vs  time graphs”

could be reformulated to:

“Students can identify when an object is speeding up, slowing down, or not changing speed in both position vs. time and speed vs. time graphs.”

There is probably a lot more that you might want students to be able to do with these types of graphs, but specifically identifying what the expectation is helps both students and teachers.  It provides a clear guide for what should be taught and measured.

The second way that standards should reflect USE of information is by identifying what the real-world use of the information is.  The real-world value should be identified as party of the standards document.  Students are always asking “why do we need to know this.”  In addition, teachers who value teaching depth rather than breadth often develop project/problem-based units of study around real-world topics.  One thing we want is for students to use the information in authentic, real-world ways.  It is by using the information to solve-problems, clarify concepts, etc. that students really own the information.  Plus, aren’t we teaching them this stuff for reasons beyond just taking tests?  The whole point is that we want students to be able to USE information in their efforts to make sense of the world, solve problems, and make their mark on the future.  I think, though, that it is incumbent on those bodies that devise these content standards to provide guidelines, examples, and suggestions for where these concepts will be used by students in the real-world.  Since teachers already have limited time, having part of the job done for them would be helpful and provide a more unified vision.

2.  Prioritize Content Standards: Many teachers believe that the content standards expect too much to be taught in a single year.   You often hear teachers express the need to make a decision - whether to go for breadth (coverage) or depth (true understanding and rich interaction with content).   So, in my mind, any re-conception of state standards should include a prioritization of the content because depth should be the expectation (with a focus on the core standards) rather than coverage, which would only allow low level interaction with content.  There are certain skills and basic knowledge that still may need to be taught to the point that students remember it and this content would be standard across classrooms.  It is these things that will be most important for continuing our civic discourse and in the development of a solid BS detector.  But there may be additional content that isn’t critical but would provide almost a menu of optional/supplemental content for teachers to choose from.

So here’s how that might look.  Content standards would be divided into Central and Supplemental content.  For biology, there are certain things that probably all students should know and remember, such as the following for example:

Biology Central Content Standard Examples

• The basic evidence and premise of evolution and why it is a unifying concept in biology
• Cells are the building blocks of living things and it contains differentiated organelles each with an important function
• The cell nucleus and mitochondria contain DNA that is used for inheritance
• Genetic inheritance accounts for many traits of offspring

Biology Supplemental Content Standard Examples

• Meiosis and Mitosis
• Memorizing the names of organelles and their corresponding functions
• Constructing branching diagrams to classify living things
• Generating Punnett squares for traits

By relegating some content to the supplemental category, I’m not trying to say that it is not useful for students to know.  In fact depending on the angle a teacher takes toward teaching the central standards, some of the supplemental standards may come into play.  However, rather than having to focus on teaching these things to the point where they are remembered for a test, the focus can be on using the supplemental content as an illustration, clarification, or example in a unit of study that delves at something deeper.

Okay I’m done.

Teachers CAN’T Do Instructional Design

I’m sorry but it’s true.  They just can’t do it…BUT it’s not their fault.  You can blame “the Man,” as long as “the Man” conjures up an image of the long entrenched educational complex guided by tradition, infrastructure, and the latest fads.  In my last post, I compared educators and instructional designers, and I think it is interesting how different their role is.  I had always considered the two synonymous.  I went to graduate school to learn about instructional design in a program that was designed for k-12 educators.  What I learned was a very effective model for designing instruction based on the ADDIE model.  It was a revelatory program that provided powerful insights into the creation of engaging, research-based, and most importantly effective learning experiences.   So it would seem to follow that educators can and should use the same model of instructional design in performing their work.  Certainly I thought so at the time, but I want to elaborate on why I think educators just CAN’T DO it, and as I mentioned before, blame “the Man.”  I think “the Man” has handicapped educators by blindfolding them, spinning them around, and not giving them a clear target.  Why should we be playing educational “Pin the Tail on the Donkey?”  But that is what I think is happening.

In my previous post I identified five reasons that educators cannot do instructional design, time, lack of meaningful analysis, lack of defined performance, lack of continued use, and lack of motivation. I want to elaborate on why this is, why it is important, and hint at what this implies about where  we need to make the biggest changes to the hulking and inertially impaired educational complex.

Problem #1 – Time

No one in education would disagree that teachers simply do not have enough time built into their day to do their job well.  That’s why the best teachers spend much of their evenings and weekends planning, grading work, and calling parents.  The problem is that if educators were to actually do instructional design, they would need to do even more than what they are currently doing, and that  means an investment of more time.  The Science of Learning by Robert T. Hays makes the point that Instructional Design is effective as long as it is done scientifically and methodically.  Teachers, however, tend to barely have enough time to Develop and Implement their lessons (the third and fourth letters in the ADDIE acronym).  In ADDIE, one of the most important steps is the Analysis.  By gathering information about your audience and the performance you are aiming to improve, you are able to tailor instruction so that it is successful.  For educators, there just isn’t time to gather and analyze this information, let alone spend the time to carefully Design the instruction you want to Develop before you Implement it.  Currently the vast majority of a teacher’s day is spent in Implementation, teaching the day’s lesson.  Also, it is difficult to have time to truly Evaluate the instruction as well.  Sure assessments and tests will provide some level of Evaluation of the success of instruction.  Plus teachers are constantly doing informal evaluations through a variety of means.  But Evaluation is meant to inform the instructional strategy itself.  It is a key element to the concept of data-based decision making because it allows for the instruction to be modified, re-designed, and improved.  Even if you have an electronic means of assessing students that provides analytics, you still need to interpret those analytics in order to determine how you should modify instruction and this takes time!  But time is probably the least of my worries for why educators can’t do instructional design, so read on.

Problem #2 – There is No Opportunity for Meaningful Analysis

Above I mentioned that educators don’t have the time to perform analysis, but lets say that they did.  What would they be analyzing?  Instructional designers are tasked with improving performance.  So what they are generally analyzing is prior performance.  For example, if a designer is tasked with improving the accuracy of TSA baggage security, they will analyze how the performance is currently being done.  They are detectives looking for clues to why the performance isn’t optimal and ways that it can be improved.  In the case of education, most likely what you are teaching is the first experience a student has with the material.  So what would you be analyzing?  At best you may be able to do a pre-test that lets you know what students already know, but how would this inform your instructional strategy which is the whole point of Analysis in ADDIE?  So you know what they don’t know.  That tells you that you need to teach it.  Big deal.  The instructional designer gets a lot more information from their analysis.  It tells you where the breakdown in performance is and will actually provide insight into whether the audience will need training, job aids, a change in the structure of the job, new equipment, or what.

Problem #3 – There is No Defined Performance

In my mind, this is probably the biggest problem and is the root of a lot of the problems that educators face.  If this were altered (as I will discuss in my next post ), it has the potential to solve some of the most niggling problems of education.  Here’s the problem:  Instructional designers know what they want the audience to do better.  If the audience is TSA baggage handlers, the designers know they want them to be more accurate in checking bags.  If the audience is the 7-Eleven employees that make the coffee, the designers know they want them to make the coffee in a reliably tasty fashion.   In order to improve performance, the designer may have to teach the audience a thing or two.  This may include facts, attitudes, a process, etc.  But the things being taught are important only because they are necessary in order to inspire performance.

Educators have no performance they are aiming for.  They are tasked with pumping facts and ideas into students’ heads without a context-of-use and without a desired performance where the facts and ideas are useful.  At best you could say that they want the students to do well on the standardized tests, and so the performance is that students should be able to use the massive array of facts and concepts they  learn to answer questions correctly in a testing environment.  Shoot, I don’t understand why our students aren’t motivated by that.  It’s almost as if what our educational complex is trying to prepare our students for is an international Trivial Pursuit tournament.  But guess what, in the future our students are not going to be playing Trivial Pursuit with China.  They need to be able to be innovators, hard-workers, creative problem-solvers, etc. in order to compete in the global marketplace, which is at least one of the goals of a good education.  But the only performance that we have identified is the recall and understanding of facts, concepts, etc.  There is not context-of-use for the information that we are teaching to students.  How are students supposed to use the information in the future?  What will be the context-of-use where this information will be important.  If educators were also provided with a guide to why the information is important, aside from the need for students to remember it on a test, perhaps instruction could be designed better.  In fact, that might be what we decide to test in order to define whether our efforts have been successful.  Some educators create project-based learning opportunities for students that create a real-world context of use.  This is great, but it takes time and requires the educator define the importance of the information.  If the local, state, or national entity that created the standards in the first place also identified how they expected this information to be used and why it is important, it could make instruction and the evaluation of success much simpler and more meaningful.  This will be the topic of my next post, because I think this point is very important, and I’m not sure I’m making it well here.  Essentially I think our standards need re-thought in two respects.

Problem #4 – There is No Continued Use

Another reason that instructional designers are able to employ the ADDIE model effectively is that there is an expectation that their target audience will continue to use the knowledge they acquire from any instructional intervention.  If they are taught the necessary information in order to perform their job more effectively, they will be constantly using that information in the future.  This is what makes it worth it for instructional designers to put significant effort into the ADDIE process.  The designer isn’t just focusing a day’s worth of instruction to teach a topic that will be irrelevant the next day and just needs to be remembered months later for a test.  The information has inherent value because it will be used again and again.   Let’s say an educator who teaches 7th grade science is planning to teach about photosynthesis in a unit about plants.  They are also expected to teach the structure and function, reproductive processes, and other important processes of plants.  Well the next unit may be about evolution.  Will photosynthesis be something that students will need to remember in detail for that unit? No.  Next year they will go on to physical science.  Will students need to remember photosynthesis then?  No.  When the child grows up will it be important to remember specific details about the process of photosynthesis?  No (unless they become a scientist).  Will they need to remember specific details about the process of photosynthesis for the test?  Yes.  The only future performance that is important is the test, unless the students were to become a scientist in the future.  A whole lot of effort will need to be employed to teach photosynthesis effectively so that students remember key details for a test, but to me that’s a lot wasted effort.  The students who will need to know about photosynthesis in detail will learn about it in depth when they have chosen a career path that will require the continued use of this information.  At that point, that knowledge will become important for a specific performance!   For average Joe student a lot of time will be invested into trying to force Joe to remember something that is ultimately value-less in his life, for a very meager payoff – the student just might remember tedious facts for the standardized test. 

Problem #5 – Lack of or Manufactured Motivation

This is another important difference between the job of an instructional designer and the job of an educator.  Instructional designers are lucky enough to be working with people that care about their job, at least they probably do.  Since they care about bonuses, advancement, job security, etc. the audience of an instructional designer is already motivated to a certain degree to do their job well.  Plus the audience may truly love what they do.  They already have an interest in the topic and skills related to the performing their role.  Sure instructional designers still have to worry about creating instruction that is motivating and engaging.  You can squander the motivational capital that the audience of an instructional designer brings with boring instruction, but for the most part the motivation is there and it is only possible to lose it. Educators are in a totally different boat.  Unless a student simply loves to learn or has an interest in the topic, the educator is tasked with imprinting that information in their brains whether the student cares or not.  Some teachers are masters of making things like photosynthesis seem like vital and interesting information, but that is a tall order, especially since students don’t know why this is important or how they will ever use it.  This lack of motivation, paired with the concerns above, is the key to why instruction tends to be ineffective.

Okay, so I’ve told you the five reasons that I think educators CANNOT do instructional design.  Here’s why I think this is important revelation.  I think educators should do instructional design.  It is an effective and proven strategy for designing instruction.  But I think that the system needs restructured in order to make this possible because there are significant barriers to making it possible for teachers to employ a proven strategy for quality instruction.  In my mind the first step in restructuring is to re-define the outcomes of a quality education.  Are we preparing our students for international trivial pursuit tournaments, which is what I think our current system is designed to do, or do we want something much more significant?  I think this goes back to the age old debate about standards-based education.  My 2¢ is coming soon to a blog near you, in fact it’s coming to this blog, in a post entitled Building a City, Building a Future.  That is, unless I decide to change the title.

Educators vs Instructional Designers – Tackling Some Questions

Educators.  Instructional designers.  Are they the same thing?  Should they follow an identical process?   Does education have something to learn from the field of instructional design?  These are the questions I want to tackle in this blog post.  I’ll try to tackle them, but maybe they run faster than me.  Recently thinking about education has made my mind hurt and I feel like sitting on the sidelines.  Okay coach is sending me in.  I’m gonna try to make the tackle…

Tackling Question 1:  Are educators and instructional designers synonymous (or at least should they be synonymous)?

Here’s what I think:

If educators and instructional designers did the same thing, then they would employ the same methodology in performing their respective roles.  For example, instructional designers typically employ the ADDIE model when designing trainings, job aids, or other interventions to improve performance.  So are educators and instructional designers the same?  This is the first step in answering the next question, “Should they employ the same methodology?”

I think educators have a very different, but related, task when compared with instructional designers, and I believe their job is much more difficult. “Why?” you ask.  Ok, I’m running after the wide-receiver…

Instructional designers tend to be employed in order to improve performance.  There is a specific target that the company or organization hiring them has in mind.  For example, 7-Eleven may feel that their traditionally awesome coffee has started to taste a little bitter or weak.  Something has gone wrong with how 7-Eleven employees are managing the coffee station.  (This isn’t true – 7-Eleven still has awesome coffee.)  If 7-Eleven were to experience this problem, then they could call in an instructional designer who would identify what barriers there are to performance and either design trainings or job aids to help the employees perform more effectively.

Educators tend to be employed in order to teach some proscribed set of knowledge and skills to all students.  A state or local agency outlines specific target sets of knowledge and skills to be taught in each subject matter and grade.  So a history teacher may be expected to teach about the Constitutional Convention.  All students are expected to learn about this important event in our nation’s history and there are generally no guidelines offered by the state for how students are expected to use this knowledge – other than that students should be able to correctly answer questions about the Constitutional Convention on a standardized test.  So the teacher designs a learning experience that teaches these facts in a way that the information will be encoded into long-term memory (not necessarily used).  There is no expected performance utilizing this information rather than recall for the standardized test.

So there are several key difference between these two roles:

• Goals:
  • Instructional Designers have a very specific goal.  Their goal is to improve a SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE in a particular CONTEXT.  Information that is learned in their trainings has value because it improves performance.  That is why it is learned.  The why is the reason for the instruction.
  • Educators have as their goal to help students acquire a BROAD SPECTRUM of knowledge and skills considered FOUNDATIONAL to an educated citizen regardless of context, chosen profession.  Why this particular knowledge is important is not specified.  The reason for the instruction is simply so that students learn the information.  There are no specific goals related to use of the information.
• Audience:
  • Instructional designers generally have members of an organization as their audience.  Certain commonalities generally follow simply because their audience are all members of the organization.  They have all CHOSEN to be employed or members of the organization.  Audience members likely have similar SKILL SETS or INTERESTS because they have chosen this career path or membership.
  • Educators on the other hand largely work with an audience that has no unifying characteristics other than AGE.  ALL students are expected to learn the material regardless of their interests, passions, career goals, etc. because the knowledge is seen as foundational.
• Outcomes:
  • Instructional designers are expected to produce DEFINED RESULTS.  What counts as success is clear, and all knowledge and skills are situated in a particular CONTEXT OF USE.  Designers know exactly why, how, and when the knowledge and skills will be applied, and there is a specific GAP they are trying to close with the intervention.  Performance will be REPEATED as the employee or organization member continues their work.
  • With educators the results are Ill-DEFINED.  State standards do not tend to outline how the knowledge and skills students are gleaning from their education should be used, and the only performances that are measured and valued are GRADES and STANDARDIZED TESTS that provide NO CONTEXT OF USE and certainly NO CONTINUED, SUSTAINED USE of the the information.
• Motivation:
  • In the case of instructional designers, their audience will tend to have motivation built into their membership:  SALARY, ADVANCEMENT (based on performance reviews), JOB SECURITY, ATTAINING COMMON GOALS.  The knowledge and skills are something that they will use again and again in order to do their job.  The knowledge itself has value because they know how they will use it.  It isn’t just something to be remembered for no specific/clear purpose.
  • Educators have a problem with motivation.  Almost always the motivation for learning that is offered is simply that learning the material is a hurdle that is necessary for advancement.  If you do well and make a good GRADE, you may get into COLLEGE or get your DIPLOMA.  Unless you simply happen to be interested, the information only has value until you have achieved the grade or have gotten your diploma.  Then it becomes irrelevant.  The motivation for learning is not related to the value of the knowledge or skills.

Summing up.  Even though the job of both educators and instructional designers is to instruct and guide, educators and instructional designers work in very different circumstances.  The apparent role of the educator is to provide a broad-base education for students that provides a sampling of knowledge in important fields as well as provides a foundation of knowledge and skills that allow the students to be active and successful citizens.  The role of the instructional designer is to militate the circumstances of successful performance in a specific context.  They are very different.

Sweet!  Made the tackle!  Or is there a penalty on the play?  You tell me.  Gotta move on to the next play…

Tackling Question 2:  Should they follow an identical process?  Does education have something to learn from the field of instructional design?

Working in different circumstances does not necessarily imply that educators and instructional designers should employ different models as a guide for their practice.   Although I worked in K-12 education, I went to graduate school at San Diego State in order to get a  Master’s in Educational Technology where I learned about instructional design.  (Quick plug:  great program at SDSU) But that still doesn’t answer the question.  Should they use the same process?  The most pervasive model used by instructional designers as a guide for their practice is the ADDIE model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate).  At least at first glance it seems like perhaps educators should use this model.  Why shouldn’t they analyze, then design an instructional package, develop it, implement it in the classroom, and evaluate the effectiveness of the instructional package?  Should educators use this model in their work?

Well, in some important respects, they can’t even if they wanted to.

1. Time:   Planning an instructional intervention in Instructional Design takes a lot of back end work.  You analyze the audience, the needs, the goals, and most importantly the gaps prior to instruction.  Educators have to daily churn out plans for the day with limited time.  Generally the process is more like the DIE model of teaching.  Design, Implement, Eternally with no chance to take a breath.  Create a lesson, deliver it, and repeat without having time to truly analyze needs, design instruction to meet those needs, and evaluate success.  So even if educators want to analyze, carefully design, and evaluate their instruction, there just isn’t time.
2. No Meaningful Analysis:  When instructional designers do the Analysis portion of ADDIE, they are generally analyzing the status of the performance they are tasked with improving.  For example, in the 7-Eleven case above, the instructional designer would perhaps observe employees performing their task, survey them about the current process, guidelines, etc.  This data would provide information for the designer so that they could identify why the performance is not up to par.  It may indicate a need for better training, better job aids, a need form more staff, etc.  The analysis informs the strategy.  In the case of education there is no prior performance to be analyzed because ultimately education is not focused on performance.  The goal each year is to fill the child’s head with new knowledge.  So analysis would be simply the flimsy act of determining what students already know.  The analysis will only inform what you need to focus on, not what strategy to implement.
   
3. No Defined Performance: Instructional design hinges on improving performance.  In education there is no specifically outlined way that students are expected to use the knowledge they gain; there is no context of use.  This is probably why information tends to be taught at a surface level (recall and comprehension).  Educators can simulate or create contexts of use where students will be asked to apply and use the information they learn, but these are not an inherent part of the system.  If educators create or simulate the contexts of use, this takes time (see above).  Plus then the specific ideas of the educator are defining the value of the information.  If the state or locality takes the time to identify the information that should be taught, why aren’t they articulating its value as well.
4. Lack of Continued Use:  Part of what makes the very extensive nature of the ADDIE model feasible is that all of the effort put into the endeavor is meant to not only support a single performance but extended performance over time.  In education you are covering so much material, it is not worth repeatedly coming back to topics like the Krebs cycle or the Roman empire.  Generally the knowledge is only important until the end of that grade level and then it is never mentioned again.  Why put the effort into making sure that students learn, and learn well, what the Magna Carta is and why it was important?
5. Lack of or Manufactured Motivation:  Encouraging students to feel motivated to learn can be an art-form.  Some teachers are masters and some students simply love to learn, but for many students telling them that they need to know a broad array of information that crosscuts academic fields and includes tidbits like the steps of photosynthesis because it may be important some day or because it is basic scientific literacy isn’t going to provide the motivational gravitas the student needs.

So my argument is that teachers can’t employ the ADDIE model because it isn’t feasible and the circumstances of the task outlined for them by the state and how success is measured makes it unrealistic.

Did I make the tackle?  Oh I see a flag on the field.  Here it is:

Notable Exceptions to my “they can’t even if they wanted to” claim:

If an educator is teaching an audience that is motivated by a specific outcome, then I believe that educators should use instructional design strategies.  Some examples would be educators in teacher education programs, elective classes that teach a skill such as drama or wood shop, or any education program that is preparing students for a specific trade, hobby, or career.  In these situations, you know what you want your students to be able to do to be successful, and you can identify what knowledge and skills are necessary.  In addition, they are motivated because they are training in a field that they have chosen.  The outcome is defined and the students have a reason to attain that outcome.  For example, if you are a professor in a teacher education program, all of your students want to become exceptional teachers.  So you can identify particular outcomes that are important, and design instruction appropriately.  In contrast, if you are teaching high school biology, you are given a goodie bag of facts and skills the students should acquire, but you don’t know how they will use this knowledge in the future.

Why does this matter?

Well, frankly I think it matters a lot.  I think sometimes we act like the process for teachers is clear and straightforward.  If only teachers did it, then everything would be peachy.  Instructional designers have a much more straightforward task.  Teachers have way too much on their shoulders because ultimately their task is not even defined for them.   I know that when I first learned about instructional design, it seemed to me that it defined how teachers should approach the process of education, but now a days it seems an insurmountable task.  In my next few posts I’m going to write about my thoughts for education reform because I am still trying to work through what I think about the following:

• What counts as foundational knowledge and skill for teachers
• How should we teach teachers to teach
• What expectations we should have as a locality, state, or larger society for education and the role it plays
• How can the system be better structured to meet those expectations

Sorry for all of the sports metaphor embedded in the post.  It felt right at the time.  Funny thing is, I don’t even like football.