Balance

An important point that can be extracted from Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind is this: you need balance. This is no shocking revelation, in fact it is a quite simple notion that many people live their lives by. Education is no different. Education cannot live by one pedagogy alone, nor one tool alone. There must to be a blend, or a balance. Oppenheimer describes P.S. 234 in Tribeca, New York. This school overflows with constructivist projects that challenge the students. But the principal admits that to her constructivism in "its pure form is too relaxed, in her experience, for keeping up with today's hard-nosed state standards." So they mix in more teacher guidance (direct instruction?) and they do well on the city's test scores.

This is a balancing act that many teachers face -- how to make learning interesting, hands-on, relevant, powerful, and also ensure that they will perform proficiently on the standardized test. I often use inquiry-based projects in my own classroom, but I don't use it for everything. They do take more time than other teaching practices, but I believe it is powerful learning. Now that there is a push to link test scores to teacher evaluation, this could possibly force teachers like myself to be less balanced in their instructional practices. Oppenheimer earlier in the book describes how in Texan schools, all instruction shuts down for several weeks of test prep. This could easily be considered an exaggeration, but I personally know a teacher that moved to Texas and she has confirmed this practice. Could this be my future as a teacher?

Going back to P.S. 234, they manage to be successful without computers as any kind of emphasis. Though despite their success, through a parent drive, they now have a new state-of-the-art computer lab. Technology is coming, like it or not. Knowing how and when to use will be the key to balanced instruction. Many of the technology points that Oppenheimer makes in 2003 are mute now in 2009. Technology is getting better, and educators are getting better at using it and evaluating it. But he is right about one thing, technology is not the answer to all of education's problems. Rather there is a mix of many answers. A key part to any mix is communication. In many of the successful schools that Oppenheimer describes, talking, discussing, communicating ideas was an integral part of it; learning is a social process. Now there are many Web 2.0 tools that are social and communication tools. Should blogs replace classroom discussions? Of course not, but that's not to say that blogs can't be a tool to be used. I have my students use a wiki to create what they think the classroom rules should be. Do I need to use a wiki? No, they could use paper and pencil. But with a wiki, when they are at home and get an idea they can add it to their group's list. It's just a matter of picking the right tool for the right task. The tech tool will not always be the best one; sometimes it will.

Software, Research & Hype

This quote gave me pause, because I think it is true.

"The education community expects people to be just like they are, that they're there because they want to help kids. If someone comes in with a motive to make money, you've got the most gullible population in the world just eating out of your hands." -Former senior employee of School Renaissance Institute

Oppenheimer's description of Accelerated Reader makes apparent that educators can easily be manipulated by testimonials and self-serving research. Educators want to believe the hype because they want to help their students and AR is all about the hype. I visited their website; sure enough there was the claim that it is The world's most widely used reading software. Can fifty million Elvis fans be wrong? Hopefully teachers can judge for themselves whether or not a program has any merit. But seldom does the classroom teacher get the opportunity to pick and choose the programs that they get. We have AR at my school site, I use it, but I wouldn't describe it as reading software. It doesn't teach reading. It's an easy ten question quiz that kids take after reading a book. The information it gives is purely summative and does not help me teach reading. I had one student that would regularly get 4 out of 10 correct. AR didn't show me how to help this kid. For our purposes, it was simply a way to hold students accountable for independent reading -- that's all.

Last year at my school, we were in a "spend it or lose it" mode and we had several brand new computers that the PTA purchased sitting unused in classrooms. Our principal decided that with no teacher training it was best to go a software based approach. So he purchased three different software programs: Acelerated Reader, ST Math, and Ticket to Read. Accelerated Reader only cost us $1500 because we had it several years before and the re-start up was slightly discounted. AR was recommended by our CIO (my principal's boss). My principal admitted that he didn't read any research on it, but the research around independent reading as an indicator for success was extensive. 55 minutes is the optimum time for students to read independently on a daily basis, which is the crux of the AR program. Kids who read this much test off the charts in comparison groupings, AR or not.

I asked my principal about how he came to purchase the other two programs. He explained that the math department had looked at a bunch of computer programs for Extended Day Math and really liked ST Math, but it was too expensive. Noteworthy is that ST MAth is produced by Mind Research Institute which is a non-profit organization. Hmm... We paid $40,000 for a site package! My principal explained his thinking:

"The kicker was my coach, Dr. Ward, had been contacted by a school principal in LA who was using ST Math and getting phenomenal results. With this testimonal in hand I felt confident we should purchase it. Again I tend to trust testimonials from people I know versus "research" posted in software sales literature. It is interesting to note that almost every software program has some sort of research to back them up. Usually it's pointing to schools doing well on standardized testing. Not sure that it is trustworthy research."

Ticket to Read, which is produced by Voyager, was included with an intervention program and was chosen for similar reasons. I used all three programs last year, and the only one that I felt was not very effective was Accelerated Reader. So why is it The world's most widely used reading software? It does have some things going for it. It is motivational for some kids and now the program is web-based and has just about every children's book there is. However, the designer in me has several ideas that could make AR much more of an instructional tool. It could be much more formative. Rather than it being a quiz taken at the end of the book, there should be a quiz after every few chapters. That is assessment information that would be useful to me. Also, instead of simple comprehension questions, there should be a variety of questions that address different reading skills (inference, character analysis, etc.).

It seems that no program is going to be perfect; there will always be things that could be better. Also it seems that the research will never completely prove that whether a program truly works. There are just too many variables. But certainly software designer should be using research to help them make a tool that works. It will be up to educators to evaluate them.

Flickering Mind Indeed

There was much that resonated for me while I read through the first third of Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind (2003). Much of the time I found myself having to reread sections because my own flickering mind had wandered off from the book to think about my own experiences. 1985 in high school typing on an early word-processing program. 2003 as a first year teacher at Sherman Elementary never once touching the computers in my classroom (there were only two, and I don't think they worked). Comparing my own current distance-learning experiences with the COMET program with situations that Oppenheimer described. My experience did not match his portrayal of the brilliant student Andrew Hunt having a rough go of it. Since Andrew's episode happened several years ago, perhaps distance-learning has improved greatly. Perhaps since I am in an Educational Technology program, the professors know what they are doing in regards to distance-learning. There are always many variables to consider, and the findings are often inconclusive. While I didn't agree with everything I've read so far, I always try to connect it to my own experiences. In the first section of his book, History of Technotopia, I fear some of what he describes in other districts will be doomed to repeat here in my own.

Oppenheimer describes how first film was going to be the magic teaching tool, then radio, then television, and now of course computers. He goes on to describe how Apple lobbied for tax rebates on donated computers and that everyone wanted to get computers into the classroom. Computers were going to fix education. Enormous amounts of money was spent, equipment was not used or flawed, teachers did not know how to use it, achievement was not improved. Computers did not fix anything, they were just another example of history repeating itself. Film, radio, TV, computers. But what he does not emphasize is the rate of advance of technology. He describes a class wasting much time searching the internet for information that could've been found in books. Of course, they were using pre-Google search engines. That makes a huge difference. His book is only six years old, but things improve so fast that some of what he writes about has lost some of its relevance.

But one thing that he talks about that has not changed is the expense of this equipment and determining whether or not it is worth it. The San Diego Unified School District has $2.1 billion from Prop. S, and a healthy chunk of it will be spent on technology.

Proposition “S” will wire classrooms for interactive learning and school campuses for WiFi. It will enable students to access lessons online. It will also help teachers and students interact directly. Proposition “S” will bring technology upgrades to every school in every neighborhood.

I have seen the roll-out plan and the lists of what each grade level will be getting -- smart boards, clickers, computers. Personally, I'm excited. But I can't help but notice that I haven't seen any kind of training plan for using any of it. I fear that a lot of this costly equipment will go unused. I also fear that this equipment will be used ineffectively. These are two big ideas from the first third of Oppenheimer's book: the technology is not cost effective and that sometimes it is used for it's own sake. Unwillingly, I find myself agreeing with him. Until teachers are taught how to use these tools in pedagogically sound ways, are we getting the most bang for our buck? Perhaps not.