• Director of Learning and Development at Mozilla, makers of Firefox (and guardians of an open and generative ‘net)
• College Partnership Director, KIPP.
• Controller at Reading Partners
• Business Development Manager, IISME
• Director of Marketing, Galileo Learning

Leslie Rule, formerly a producer at KQED’s Center for Digital Media, argues that iPads may be a game changer in education.

If that sounds a little gung-ho, I think it’s worth wrestling with something that Steve Jobs said earlier this year. He compares PCs to trucks– sturdy, powerful, but not used by the average consumer:

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

If you are evaluating what kind of technology to bring into a school, it’s worth considering how the landscape is changing, as you think about what you want technology to do for students, and what they need to do with technology. Some of the current paradigms have to change — carrying a seven pound laptop in addition to 30 pounds of textbooks just makes no sense.

Also in the interview is Tina Barseghian, who runs KQED’s new website on technology in education, Mind/shift.

The road show consists of a great old Airstream trailer filled with real products that have been designed with humanitarian ends in mind. Among the products, my favorites were the ones designed for ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ customers. This isn’t design as in “Design Within Reach” or Michael Graves tea kettles, this is design for sustainability and improving lives.

And design as a process– as in “design thinking.”

If you’re looking for a good intro to design thinking or just some inspiration to bring it into your school, you should checkout the toolkit on their site. Download the toolkit here.

At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.

There are two points relevant to education. First: are the systems we are building in the name of “reform” equipping teachers and students to take advantage of the information in front of them in active, entrepreneurial, concrete ways? Or are we building (in Brooks’ words) “more protocols, more layers and more review systems?” These diverging approaches are built on two very different understandings of what knowledge looks like.

I’ll let Brooks make the second, regarding the inherent fallibility of bureaucracies:

we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

This is point of a nice little essay by Richard Gamble over at the Front Porch Republic. He quotes Wendell Berry’s character Hannah Coulter (from the eponymous novel):

Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn’t that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn’t that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment?
And how are you ever to know where the thread breaks, and when the tug begins?

How can we tell stories to (paraphrasing C.S. Lewis) “fire the imagination and strengthen the will?”

Of course, schools are not the only storytellers, nor should they be:

“Education happens in many contexts: in the family from the time children are infants; in the extended family of grandparents and aunts and uncles (including the memory of ancestors long dead); in the alleys and sidewalks and playgrounds of neighborhoods; in the church; and within the classroom walls of more formal education.”

But are our schools telling compelling, jargon-free stories? Do they fire the imagination? Build civic culture? Or are we stuck talking to ourselves, confusing big storylines with incremental improvements in metrics?

See the cartoon here.

We seem to have the same attitude when it comes to teacher expertise and effectiveness. There now (finally) seems to be great agreement that teacher effectiveness is a major factor, indeed the major factor in student achievement. On some level, everyone–from administrators to the policy community and politicians–now seems to acknowledge this, even if they are not familiar with the research on which it is based.

Unfortunately, some of the proposals developed on top of this idea seem to ignore what expertise is, and how it is developed. They leave these critical issues inside a black box. Measuring teacher expertise based on student test scores may be helpful, if done well, but it provides none of the critical insight into how teachers may develop this expertise. Nor can it help schools to know how to nurture these qualities among their faculty; how to create environments in which more teachers can support student success. In a good case, schools will hire teachers from among the most vetted, certificated, and tested candidates, wait for the miracles to occur, and then measure the teachers against test scores to see which teachers are “effective.”

In a worse scenario, however, there are even more alarming problems. First, research points to no correlation between short-term student test scores and long-term achievement. If the evaluations only relate to standardized tests from that particular year, they will not drive the kind of long-term boost to achievement that schools, parents, and states are looking for. Second, any connection to short-term test scores will drive teachers not only to teach to the test, but encourage them to game the system. Third, this approach reinforces the mistaken notion that teaching is a solitary activity done apart from peers, and destroys incentives for teachers to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways.

Who would benefit from the proposal to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores? Students? If a student is fortunate enough to bounce from one well-rated teacher to another, and if a sustainable system somehow evolves (the miracle again) to attract only these top-testers as teachers. Teachers? Perhaps not. If the question of teacher expertise development is left inside the black box, only those teachers who have by luck or craft managed to navigate the system to improve student scores will be clear beneficiaries. But even they will not benefit as much as they could if their own development were being actively guided. The rest of the teachers may not know what to expect, and it is hard to imagine any default benefit. Parents may feel like they are benefiting, but only if they find ways to get their kids into the classrooms higher-ranked teachers. Administrators will get clearer numbers to look at, but their accountability for creating environments that produce good results will go down. Outside vendors, developers of tools like data systems and services like professional development, may do pretty well.

This is precisely the specter that stands in front of us now: that at the very moment the importance of teacher quality has become widely acknowledged, that knowledge will be misused to create another layer of systems which help neither teachers nor students.

The US Department of Education’s recent Race to the Top Fund will provide more than four billion extra dollars for states’ reform efforts, provided that they do “not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers.” Section C(2) of the guidelines lays out the requirements to tie student data to teacher evaluation, and from there to teacher feedback, professional development, promotion and compensation. There has been a bit of brouhaha about this program in states such as California and New York, which have legislation forbidding the use of student data in teacher evaluation and tenure.

States are, of course, free to write proposals for funding which do acknowledge what we know about developing expertise among teachers: the role of collaboration; the role of trust in schools; the required stance of continuous improvement and self-reflection; the importance of physical environments; and a more sophisticated view of knowledge that recognizes its social, tacit, and generative aspects. Unfortunately, there is no new incentive for states and schools to push in these directions.

Food is precious.

I have been involved with a number of teaching gardens over the past 20 years, on both the east and west coasts–which is what made me want to visit the Edible Schoolyard garden. In every case, the gardens seemed to have a main philosophical rationale, a justification for their construction and staffing and maintenance. In one case, an urban teaching garden in North Philadelphia recreated bits of a local habitat in the middle of acres of concrete and macadam. There, I had the privilege of creating curricula that would help the school’s teachers bring science classes outdoors for high-quality science explorations. Other school and teaching gardens have other themes: butterfly habitat gardens remain especially popular, for instance.

However, in almost every case, the uses that the gardens allow exceed these narrow definitions. One area private school had a small organic garden, with a number of fruit trees, a chicken coop, and beds of herbs and vegetables. Did students learn about growing food? Absolutely. Science? Yes, that too, in both explicit and subtle ways. However, social-emotional learning was a big part of what happened during students’ time in the garden, as well. So students took away much more than simply how to garden organically.

School and teaching gardens have great “affordances,” to use the word as Greeno does. It allows many kinds of interactions among its users, unlike highly constrained school classroom environment.

The Edible Schoolyard garden takes advantage of this, building in relationships between the garden program and the science curriculum; and between the kitchen program and the humanities curriculum. But you can’t reduce the garden to being a subset of the science curriculum, nor the kitchen to the humanities. And I think that makes some school heads nervous: how do you justify these gardens if you cannot easily label their impact? We want to be able to reduce the effect to a simple statement.

I think the gardens’ justification comes in something irreducible, though simple enough: it is the ‘ecological validity‘ of the learning that happens in these spaces that seems to be so powerful. In other words, unlike learning a subject in an artificially constrained classroom environment and then having no idea how to apply it in the real world, garden learning by its nature allows students to see “what really happens” in a big, loosely controlled space.

Whether you are interested in hands-on learning, or nutrition, or connecting schools to their communities, you may want to visit the Edible Schoolyard garden. It is a teaching garden done very well–and a model for many other similar efforts around the country.

Learn more about the garden at the Edible Schoolyard site. Of course, if you live close or can find a way to get out to the San Francisco Bay area, you can check out one of their free monthly tours. If you attend a tour, you will have a chance to purchase some of the related educational curricula and other publications at the end.

Back on their site, you can find standards-oriented classroom lessons, as well as recipes for your own garden or kitchen.

Finally, a few pictures of the garden in the spring of 2009:

The important development in California for K-12 education has been the governor’s digital textbook initiative. The project was launched during the state’s budget crisis, and consequently its potential for saving money was played up, perhaps a bit too much: there is a lot to be worked out to bring quality curricula to scale, even if the materials are all open-licensed for free access to teachers and students. In times of crisis, a promise of an eventual 300 to 500 million dollar savings sounds especially tantalizing.

Criticism of the existing K-12 textbook market comes from many non-budgetary angles, including:

• the approval process, its politicization, and consequences for the content;
• the sheer weight of paper texts (80 pound kids carrying 40 pounds of texts);
• the dead trees critique;
• the inflexibility of the format, where updates take years, and adaptations stay only in the teachers’ hands;
• the ability of digital resources to teach complicated material in interactive ways;
• the “digital natives” argument, i.e., the current generation needs digital resources because that is their context and milieu;
• the recognition that the number of media formats for communicating information have exploded in the last five (and even fifty) years.

Krasny talks with California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas about the progress of the state’s initiative, including its recent approval of the first ten texts.

Here’s the entire hour broadcast:

In the segment on California’s K-12 initiative, there are some hopeful signs: the first phase of the initiative has found ten resources that meet at least 90 percent of the states standards. (See the scores of all submitted materials at the California Learning Resources Network, along with links to the texts themselves.)

But as Scientific American has pointed out, one thing that hasn’t changed with the approved resources is their production model: the highly rated resources are still single-author or at least paid author teams, even if they have been open-licensed.

Secretary Thomas reminded listeners that this initiative is about “letting a thousand flowers bloom,” about being open to many models of what digital “textbooks” could look like, even while insisting on high standards. So it may not be every kid with a Kindle.

But plenty of hurdles remain, including naive thinking around budget implications. There are also big implications for the role of teachers if schools want to engage with open materials in deep ways. In any case, an interesting space to keep an eye on. A few additional resources to explore, if you have not met some of the players:

CK-12
Curriki.org
Connexions
and Creative Commons