This is the third in a series of posts on assessment. I imagine that it won’t be the last, but I think this is the most important of the three thus far. The first post was inspired by a post by Henrick Oprea (Blog, Twitter) and developed as I read posts by Steven Anderson’s (Blog, Twitter) and Jan Webb (Blog, Twitter). If you are just checking in at this point, here are the links to the first to posts (Note: I had started this post prior to attending Educon 2.2 at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, January 29 – 31, and worked on it while I was there, thus there is an Educon influence):

Thoughts on Assessment 1: A response

Thoughts on Assessment 2: A conversation

I have been researching and toying with this post for a few weeks and recently saw a link, in my Twitter stream, to a post by Jim Blecher (Blog, Twitter), entitled, “SocialMedia CreativityCommunity.” It really clicked for me and brought the pieces of this post together. I am a firm believer that even the most jaded students enjoy learning, what they hate, is school. There can be any number of reasons this is true, but one that is arguably universal across the student spectrum is the fact that far too much of school is organized around testing and not around learning. School is focused on the process of knowledge inoculation as opposed to knowledge appropriation. Teachers need to vaccinate themselves against the evils of high stakes testing and in order to do that, they design learning that focuses on the fractured knowledge that is required to successfully produce on those tests. Students, on the other hand, want to know “stuff” and want to see what can be created out of it, they want to appropriate the knowledge to themselves, shall we say, Construct Meaning. The missing element in the equation is relevance and it is missing because it has been tested out of the school process. I am not referencing just the high-stakes standardized tests, those are merely the most egregious example. What I want to focus on in this post is, hopefully writing an obituary for the idea of summative testing, or at least declare it in critical condition.

In Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, Allan Collins (Profile, Wikipedia) and Richard Halverson (Profile) talk about the way in which we determined the learning progress of a student (apprentice in those days) years ago:

In the apprenticeship era, the adult carefully observed learners and corrected them as they went along, giving them tasks they were ready for, and seeing whether they completed them successfully. Observation during the course of task completion combined the functions of formative and summative assessment. Ongoing, formative encouragement or critique provided feedback to guide the learner through tasks, and the final, summative judgment gave learners feedback on whether the task was successfully completed.

As education began to drift, leading to its current condition of having no apparent purpose, testing began to be the tool of choice to determine if students had “learned” the appropriate information and skills determined as “necessary” to indicate that learning had occurred. This model also fit nicely into the industrial age economy. Students went to school, learned the prescribed material, proved they had learned that material via a test that required no creative or original thought, and then went on to jobs that required them to perform assembly line tasks or develop assembly line thinking and procedures, what Tom Peters (Blog, Twitter) refers to as the Ford Motor Company model of education (see his four minute presentation in this post). More and more the idea of assessment moved from helping a student see their growth and development to a judgment of their “status of learning,” which was then used to classify and categorize them – not to assist in the learning. R. J. Stiggens, writing in Phi Delta Kappan explains the the difference of “assessment for” and “assessment of” learning this way:

Assessment for learning can contribute to the development of effective schools. If assessments of learning provide evidence of achievement for public reporting, then assessments for learning serve to help students learn more. The crucial distinction is between assessment to determine the status of learning and assessment to promote greater learning.

More recently, assessment as moved from a tool with potential to help students develop mastery to one that is used to secure funding. It no longer aids students in learning, but performs a punitive function to the determent of learning. Formative assessment, far too often, is given only cursory acknowledgment and all the eggs are put in the summative assessment basket. There is something fundamentally wrong with this current situation. Formative assessment is the most powerful of the assessments in helping students learn and move toward mastery. In fact formative assessment enables a teacher to determine incremental amounts of mastery as the student moves through the learning process. Done effectively it renders summative assessment redundant and unnecessary. So, here is were I hope to put the last nail in the coffin of summative assessment (my apologies for the rather dark metaphor – but summative assessment is a dark cloud hanging over school).

The post by Jim Blecher (Blog, Twitter), entitled, “SocialMedia CreativityCommunity” highlighted the process of “perception and processing,” something students do every day in school (or we hope they do). Jim begins by talking about a song by Jonathan Coulton (embedded below):

I hope the metaphor I see here works for you as well. Let’s say that this video represents the learning that each teacher carefully crafts in their classroom. This includes a variety of pieces that students play with in the process of internalizing the information, practicing skills, and making them part of their knowing.  At various points in this process the teacher stops to check and determine if the internalization process is happening and/or to what degree (formative assessment). When gaps appear she/he work with the student(s) to insure that mastery is being developed. Better yet, let’s assume that this is a true project based learning environment. Project based learning is the process of small bits of convergent learning designed to lead to divergent assessment (that’s my theory on it any way). The small modules are designed to converge into formative checks and then open up directly into the next piece of connected learning (all within the context of understanding the big picture, which is always where learning should begin). By the time the student reaches the cumulative point of the project they have achieved mastery. If the teacher were to use a summative assessment tool (test) that was predicated on all the formative checks (as is usually the case) what would it tell the teacher? Nothing new. Lets put summative assessment, as a tool to gauge learning, out of our students misery. Back to Jim Blecher’s post.

Jim addresses the process of creativity and play within the context of a media enhanced social community – that’s not a bad description of what classrooms should be, is it? He highlights a couple of YouTube videos that grew out of Coulton’s (I did a search and there are currently 1,990 hits when searching for “code monkey”). I liked this one the best:

Continuing the metaphor from above. After working through the process of constructing meaning (internalizing learning) and mastering skills, students should be turned lose to generate something new, in other words we need divergent assessment where we now have summative assessment. Students need to add themselves to their new knowledge. In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown (Profile, Blog) describes the idea this way:

Convergent thinking is a practical way of deciding among existing alternatives. What convergent thinking is not so good at, however, is probing the future and creating new possibilities. Think of a funnel, where the flared opening represents a broad set of initial possibilities and the small spout represents the narrowly convergent solution. This is clearly the most efficient way to fill up a test tube or drive toward a set of fine-grained solutions.

If the convergent phase of problem solving is what drives us toward solutions, the objective iof divergent thinking is to multiply the options to create choices . . . By testing competing ideas against one another, there is an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more creatively disruptive, and more complelling. Linus Pauling said it best, “To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas.” – and he won two Nobel Prizes.

Summative assessment is convergent, all learning leads to one final set of questions and every student must answer them in exactly the same way. Formative assessment can be convergent and maintain integrity, using convergent assessment at the completion of learning lacks integrity. I am not suggesting we recouch summative assessment, I am advocating for its extinction. Divergent assessment is not summative. Upon completion of the mastery phase of learning students need to be set free to use their new wisdom and the requirement should be, “Show us something new, amaze us!” That is opposed to the current reality in schools. Let me paraphrase Brown from the same chapter:

The natural tendency of [education] is to constrain problem-solving and restrict [student] choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental. Though this tendency may be more efficient in the short run, in the long run it tends to make a [student] conservative, inflexible, and vulnerable to game-changing ideas from outside. Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.

Divergent assessment, by design, requires the use of the top layers of Bloom’s ideas about learning. Because students have achieved mastery along the way, of information and skills, they have a new embedded knowing that allows them to take their learning and apply it in ways that intrigue them and allow them to find purposeful meaning in their process. At this point, the restrictions are minimal – very minimal – and students are allowed to evidence their learning in powerful and meaning ways. An example of this type of expression of learning can be found in Chris Lehmann’s (Blog, Twitter) NYSCATE presentation (the segment I am referencing begins at 42:27 and a shorter version can be found here beginning at 2:40):

I don’t know if the development of the flow-process bio-diesel generator was a form of assessment, I use the example as a way for you to envision divergent assessment. The result of student learning in this situation was powerful – purposeful. It is an example of what the results of divergent assessment can look like. Students set free to play with their learning will generate this type of evidence. And, this type of evidence has the integrity that is lacking in current forms of summative assessment. This approach to assessment will, as Howard Gardner (Profile) puts it, reveal not just what students know and understand, but “also capture how those new understandings metamorphose.” Students at Science Leadership Academy complete what I feel is the closest thing to real divergent assessment in their Capstone:

The Capstone Project at Science Leadership Academy is an opportunity for students to show the scholars they have become. It represents the culmination of four years of intellectual growth towards an independent and self-directed learner who can contribute meaningfully to his or her community, whatever that means to the individual. It will enable the student to focus his interests and curiosity into a coherent representation of how he thinks and what he believes as he leave high school. The capstone represents a synthesis of the SLA mission and vision as students attempt to answer the questions: “How do we learn?” “What can we create?” and “What does it mean to lead” through a self-selected and designed independent project. As with everything we do, it should embody the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. The final product will look different for each student, just as each student has a unique perspective and approach to learning.

Yes, I hope that soon we will see the extinction of what we currently call summative assessment. It is necessary in a reality that as Tom Peters points out is, “[An] age of creation intensification.” This shift must be part of the process of rethinking school and will begin to move us toward fulfilling the lip service we pay to the statement that, “We are educating students for a future we don’t even know and can’t imagine.” Let’s write the obituary on summative assessment before it’s too late.

Convergence and Divergence graphics are from Dr. Scott McLeod and can be found on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, in the post, “Convergent v. divergent thinking in K – 12 schools.“

Stiggins, R. J. 2002. Assessment Crisis: The Absence of Assessment FOR Learning, in Phi Delta Kappan Vol.83, No.10 pp758-765.

___________

Other’s thoughts and ideas on assessment:

I Test, Therefore I Am at DragonPhysics Blog

Assessment, Giving Students A Choice by Maggie Hos-McGrane at Tech Transformation

It Is The Test! Or is it . . . at Constructing Meaning

Assess the Assessment by Tom Whitby at My Island View

Assessment as (re)search at University Writing Assessment

I am not going to do more in this post than hopefully connect you with powerful thinking that I feel is essential for framing the conversation about rethinking school and discovering what its purpose is – why do we bother perpetuating school – which I fear has evaporated over time. I will cite what I think are key ideas – but you watch them and see what you can discover and then share your reactions/responses.

Larry Lessig

Key Idea: “We can’t stop our kids from using it [technology]; we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again; we can only make them, quote, “pirates.” And is that good? We live in this weird time, it’s kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life,we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that’s what I — we — are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy we ought to be able to do better. Do better, at least for them, if not for opening for business.”

Tim Brown

Key Idea 1: “OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time, that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment, they’re the ones that feel most free to play.”

Key Idea 2: “Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly — when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, what is it? Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, what can I do with it? And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really, kind of, interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?

We’ve all told stories about how on Christmas morning, you know, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities, that as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.”

Tim Brown

Key Idea 1: “Instead of starting with technology, the team started with people and culture. So if human need is the place to start, then design thinking rapidly moves on to learning by making. Instead of thinking about what to build, building in order to think. Now prototypes speed up the process of innovation. Because it is only when we put our ideas out into the world that we really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And the faster we do that, the faster our ideas evolve.”

Key Idea 2: “So why design thinking? Because it gives us a new way of tackling problems. Instead of defaulting to our normal convergent approach where we make the best choice out of available alternatives, it encourages us to take a divergent approach, to explore new alternatives, new solutions, new ideas that have not existed before. But before we go through that process of divergence, there is actually quite an important first step. And that is, what is the question that we’re trying to answer? What’s the design brief? Now Brunel may have asked a question like this, “How do I take a train from London to New York?” But what are the kinds of questions that we might ask today?”

Tom Peters

Key Idea 1: “We live in a world that begs for creativity and what do we do? When the nine year old boy gets out of his seat inappropriately in the fourth grade we send him to the school nurse and say, ‘Dose the lad with Ritalin from now until death.”

Key Idea 2: “We are rapidly moving into the age of creation intensification.”

Key Idea 3: “We nail facts into students heads and there is nothing wrong with it if the goal is to employ somebody for forty years in a Ford  Motor Company Model A factory, right? Because the deal is, ‘Park your brains at the door, dude.’”

I am regularly amazed at the effect that Twitter can have on my thinking. Actually, not so much Twitter itself, but rather the links, shared by others, that I click through on. Today I came across an article by Maria Lorena Lehman at the web site SensingArchitecture.com titled 7 Ways to Keep You Inspired for 2010. Right away the title caught my attention. Isn’t there a constant lament heard from teachers, “How do I inspire my students to learn?” The initial thought is what can teachers do “to” students that will cause them to be inspired. Instead, what if the thinking were turned in the other direction, “What can I, as a teacher, do “to” myself that will cause my students to be inspired?”

The idea of professional development is, in my opinion, predicated on reflective activity. Without asking ones self questions, there can be no growth. What most caught my attention, after the title, was the list of seven items that Lehman identified:

Read A Lot: The more knowledge you can get from other thinkers and innovators (in other fields), the better. Doing this, you will probably find some new ways to approach complex problems, break them down and come up with sophisticated and practical design solutions.
Bend Boundaries: Set creative boundaries for yourself when you are facing a challenging design issue or problem. By exaggerating or minimizing boundaries that you are used to, it will force you to think about your design dilemma in new ways. For instance, give yourself a small allotted amount of time in which to “solve” a design issue. Or, pretend that you have three times the budget than you actually have. This might just free your mind, getting you to think of a totally different way of solving your original problem.
Streamline your Organization: Become an active thinker. During or after visiting a site, another great building, reading a magazine or even having a discussion with a fellow architect , make it a habit to record the most important thoughts that will spark your future action(s). Organizing your ideas will result in better ways for you to create new ones. Organization actually can spark creativity and innovation.
Switch Your Perspective: While working on the day-to-day details that surface for specific building projects, don’t forget to take that eagle-eyed view. Think of how Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid would approach your design problem. Or think of what a good architectural critic might say about your design challenge.
Get Out More: Although having a consistent design setting (like your office) is very conducive to being creative, so too is changing your scenery. Try thinking about a design problem in a totally different place. Go see a great architectural lecture. Or go have a brainstorming session with your colleague in a new setting.
Remember Your Colleagues: Don’t forget about the people around you. They can help you stay inspired too. Coming up with new ways to communicate with your colleagues to generate creative ideas can be quite motivational.
Set Your Goals: Don’t lose sight of your goals, whatever they may be. Be sure to revisit them often — both so your time is spent working toward them and so that you remember why you are doing what you do. One of the keys to maintaining inspiration, is also to reward yourself. After you reach certain goals be sure to enjoy them, take a break and then use that energy to renewing your momentum.

Here are the connections I see and the resulting ideas:

Read, a lot: Another constant lament of the classroom teacher is, “I don’t have enough time to do what I am suppose to do, when I am suppose to read. And read someone from another field or discipline, give me a break, I can’t even read stuff in my own.” Teachers and the administrators who create the conditions within which they work, need to be far more aware of the power in this idea. Teachers must read, read a lot, and read from a wide variety of thinkers. A way to create the possibility of more reading is by allowing teachers to bank credit necessary for re-certification or as part of professional development requirements.

Bend boundaries: This strategy would require administrators to allow teachers greater autonomy (and of course that responsibility would flow up the “chain of command” as well by necessity). School has become an environment of ever increasing constrains. Learning however happens best in an environment that allows for malleable boundaries. I remember a scene in The School of Rock, Jack Black and Joan Cusack were in the cafeteria (okay, Black’s character was rather manipulative with duplicity motives) when he floated an idea about taking the students on a field trip:

Black: Listen Roz, I was thinking about organizing a field trip. What do you think.

Cusack: Well . . . substitutes, as a rule, do not organize field trips.

Black: But, I figure I’m gonna be here for awhile . . .

Cusack: Well, that remains to be seen. Have you met the other teachers?

Black: No. But, the kids could learn by getting out of the classroom.

Cusack: It’s more complicated than that. There’s safety issues. Parent’s need to be notified. It’s against school policy.

An environment that is rigid can’t withstand change, change will destroy it. “Bendable boundaries” must become policy for learning to thrive. Rigid boundaries, like those in the school in the movie, stifle creativity, innovation, and ultimately do harm to students learning. Teachers must be given latitude to, not to think outside the box, but remove the box from their line of sight. The response from administrators shouldn’t be all the reasons “why not,” but should be “how do I help make this happen.” By affording their teachers greater autonomy, through bendable boundaries, administrators will be modeling for the school and community how to view and treat teachers as the professionals they are.

Streamline the organization: Power sharing! This too, plays into the idea of greater teacher autonomy. We need to find ways in education that allow teachers to make more substantive decisions. This will require divorcing education from the testing culture that currently controls it and most of our learning systems. I was tweeting with Vanessa Miemis (Blog, Twitter) this morning about an article she had tweeted about in SmashingMagazine.com titled The Death of the Blog. One of the quotes in the article spoke volumes:

While, yes, this is a redesign of sorts, I consider it much more a rethinking. ~ Jason Santa Maria

The article was about rethinking the way blogging is done. The thought occurred to me that this way of thinking, supported by action, would allow teachers to move away from textbook dominated (controlled!) curricula and encourage “collaborative content sourcing.” This would result in cost savings and streamlining the decision making process, especially at the classroom level. It would also place more authentic sources and voices in the hands of learners than they experience with a textbook.

Switch your perspective: This one is more than obvious. Teacher must ask themselves, “Am I learning anything in all of this?” If a teacher isn’t learning more about the art of teaching each day, well, they need to find a new career. Fast! And they may need some help or a push to realize this truth. Teachers should reflectively consider if they are learners and imagine they are sitting in a desk in their classroom (new perspective) and consider if their students are seeing the model of a successful learner. Do our student’s parents see a learner at the front of their child’s classroom? What about administrators? Community members? Teachers need to look at themselves through the eyes of those watching them and consider what they see.

Get out more: Teachers suffer from a professional debilitating disease, “isolationist.” Many bring the disease on themselves, some resist, but the environment that currently is defined as school is the prime breading ground for this menace. Teachers (and administrators) need opportunities to go out and explore the worlds they teach about in their classrooms. One way to facilitate this exploration would be to move from the idea that teachers should only be paid when they are in the classroom. Hire good teachers, sign them to 12 month contracts, and require them to explore during the summer and give extra credit to those who explore outside their comfort of their discipline. A second way to facilitate this goes one step further. Move to a 12 month academic calendar. Research has indicated that learning occurs more abundantly in an environment that allows for regular breaks. We know this to be true inside the classroom, so why do we continue to blindly follow the traditions established in an agrarian culture. Classrooms that are open for learning for 45 days followed by 15 days of refreshing mind and spirit would, I argue, greatly improve the climate of learning in our schools. Having four breaks throughout the year would afford a greater diversity of options for exploration. Again, hire good teachers, sign them to 12 month contracts, and require them to explore during their breaks.

Remember your colleagues: I’m not sure I can add more to this, “Don’t forget about the people around you. They can help you stay inspired too. Coming up with new ways to communicate with your colleagues to generate creative ideas can be quite motivational.” Again, this will raise the “time” concern. If administrators want to insure the quality of professional growth in their building(s) they must creatively find ways to allow for collaboration, activity in a Personal Learning Network, or Community of Practice. Nothing is more powerful for professional development than the hallways at an educational conference. Administrators need to intentionally create spaces and environments that encourage an ever increasing amount of collegiality.

Set your goals: Deciding ahead of time what the end will look like is an imperative. The vision must be mastery and the environment must allow that dynamic to exist and flourish. Social promotion must also be abandoned in favor of learning. Learning is a dynamic, fluid event and schools (teachers, administrators, policy makers, and parents) must embrace the idea of ending social promotion, realizing that by doing so they end the abusive practice short changing students. This point also requires that in the act of rethinking school we must first identify its purpose. The old purpose(s) are no longer relevant (and one might argue the old ones were bad anyway). School is no longer relevant because the purpose for its existence and the requirement of attendance have no foundational purpose. This is the most critical discussion in education that we can embark on as we enter a new decade.

Photo Credits:

Reading: Norby at Flickr

Jack Black at imdb.com

Letters: Jason Santa Maria at jasonsantamaria.com

Library: New York Public Library at Flickr

Goals: Dan Callahan at Flickr

I started this as a response to Clay Burell’s (Blog, Twitter) post, “Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?” and half way through decided to move it to my blog due to its length. The spark for this train of thought was the statement by Nathan Lowell (Blog, Twitter):

Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

And Clay’s response:

I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”¹

Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

The responses were also intriguing, but I kept coming back to a singular point, resparked by the above exchange, that I find fundamental to the discussion. I have worked with students in Grade 5 (US) through grad school, both online and in a physical classroom. Caveat: I have worked in self-contained classrooms, teaching almost all subject matter and settings were I worked only with specific disciplines.

I am going to disagree with a point the Clay made in his response, regarding content. We are all well aware that what passes as content increases exponentially at a rate that teachers and textbook publishers can’t keep up with. If they tried, the iteration cycle for new textbooks would be about three months (think of THAT cost). Andrew Marcinek (Blog, Twitter) concisely makes the content point in his post “My Decade“:

We can connect to copious amounts of information and communicate faster than ever before. We have even started condensing our language in order to express how we feel in 140 characters . . .

We can not possibly cover all of the available content in a school year, much less a series of 12 school years. Content as an engine of learning design must end. It is cumbersome and ultimately keeps schooling mired in the morass of data point driven learning. Content driven curriculum and learning design ends up looking like this example from Dr. Scott McLeod’s (Blog, Twitter) post, “4 Tales Out of School“

Four questions from a study packet for a middle school World Civilizations class:

A. Nubia developed trade routes over land because:

1. there was not enough wood to build boats
2. the Egyptians controlled the Nile
3. the cataracts prevented river travel in Nubia
4. Nubians only traded with West Africans

B. According to legend, who united Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt?

1. Hatshepsut
2. Menes
3. Amon-Re
4. Thutmose III

C. Thutmose III was all of the following except:

1. a conqueror
2. an educated man
3. unmerciful to the defeated
4. a great Pharaoh

D. What was the kingdom of Kerma known for?

1. great poverty
2. skilled archers
3. delicate pottery
4. ironworking

These are just a sample; most of the items in the packet are similar. Students have to ‘learn’ these because they’ll be quizzed on them.

It’s very hard for me to see this kind of schoolwork and not think that vast amounts of student time are just being wasted. And I’m the first to admit that I did this when I taught 8th grade. I didn’t know any better, but that didn’t make it right.

We pay a lot of lip service to “teaching students to be life long learners.” Where we fail is in not making a shift from content driven curriculum and learning, to process driven curriculum and learning. I contend that “how” to learn is more important than “what” is learned (Yes, I know that is a dangerous statement to make and I should expound upon it, but not right now. Suffice it to say I do think there are elemental content bits that do need to be learned). Either we really mean that we want to teach students how to learn and be life long learners or we don’t, and the current general approaches to schooling do not evidence this stated purpose. A content driven approach to school ends up being a “race to the end,” the end of the book that is. The reason this occurs is the mistaken assumption that everything printed in a textbook or curriculum guide or standards list has been thoughtfully placed there. Do teachers pause and ask, “Why am I teaching this?” What about administrators? The thinking behind content driven curriculum is that it is all “necessary” for a complete education. Who made the determination of what would be printed in the afore mentioned documents? Did they ask, “Why should this be included?” or is far to much of it there due to tradition? How often has a student expressed disappointment because a historical event, science concept, or piece of literature is skimmed over (or worse, ignored), only to receive the answer, “I am sorry, but we have to finish the book, we have a lot to cover.”

Hugh MacLeod (Blog, Twitter) in his post, “Don’t Worry if You Don’t Know ‘Absolutely Everything’ Before Starting Out” describes the end result of a content based approach and how it negatively effects our students:

They want to have ALL the ans­wers, before ever ris­king get­ting their feet wet. Hell, before even get­ting their little toe wet…

Ending his post, Clay asked:

Am I wrong to think some disciplines deserve more emphasis on coverage than others? Maths, for example, and science? Isn’t time lost on digital experimentation in these classes a costly thing, since it may cost students a deeper focus on, say, evolution, or advanced calculus, or whatever?

And if the answer is “yes” — notice the “if” and be nice, readers — then doesn’t it follow that web experimentation in some classrooms should be treated with extreme caution?

Clay is right, if educators do answer his question “yes,’ then much caution should be used in experimenting in the classroom – whether with Web 2.0 applications or other technological tools. However, I think this is the wrong focus. Let me provide two examples of what process driven learning might look like, one mine, the other from Silvia Tolisano (Blog, Twitter).

During my MA work in Pepperdine’s OMAET program (c. 2001) I was required to do an Action Research Project. I always loved literature and I tried to introduce my students to great books. I was teaching a primarily self-contained 8th grade classroom in an urban school at the time. I went to my administrator and told him I wanted to have my 8th literature students read Charles Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. He wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I explained that I wasn’t looking for a high school or college level evaluation of the text. Instead, I reminded him that I had a room full of early teens who were in the early stages of learning about relationship building and I felt the book offered insight into human relationship dynamics that they would be intrigued by. I explained that my goal was teaching my students the process of critically evaluating what they read – the content wasn’t the driver. He agreed to allow me the latitude to design a month long project and incorporate technology into the process. The catch was that I had to raise funds to bring in the technology. I raised $6,000.00 in about three weeks and within a month had new computers, wireless hubs, and software in place.

The students were organized in groups and we read corporately and individually, had complete class discussion and smaller group discussions. My students already spent tremendous amounts of time at night in AOL Instant Messenger, so I appropriated the technology. Once a week each group engaged in an AIM conversation (outside of the classroom) which revolved around three seed questions that I would provide. The group them emailed the transcript of the dialog to me. Additionally, once a week I held an optional AIM group chat that I led, to dig further into the relationships in the story. To complete the project each group collaboratively developed a graphic representation of the relationships using Inspiration. Each student also prepared an introspective essay on A. How they understood relationships, B. How they understood the formation of relationships, and C. Revelations derived from their reading and interacting in collaboration. I thrilled at the results. The technologies allowed the quiet back row students to shine and gain “expert” status and it pushed the front-row hand raising student who always had the “right” content answer to be pushed to explore new avenues of discovery. The point? It didn’t matter what book I used, the content was value neutral to the process. I could just as easily have designed a similar project in Math, Science, or Social Studies. It was about the process and not the content.

I was following my Twitter stream one day and noticed an “urgent” request from Silvia Tolisano for help in identifying a skeleton that her students had discovered on the school campus. I posit this as another example of how learning is about process and not content and technology easily fits in a process driven learning environment. Silvia chronicles the process brilliantly in her post, “CSI Twitter – Crime Scene Investigation.” I have to admit being thoroughly enthralled watching the process unfold. Yes, there was content involved, but it could have just as easily been used in Math (Scale), Language (Communication), Technology (Web 2.0 tools), as it could in the obvious Science discipline. Process, though, was king. Silvia points out:

I am amazed, again, at the power of the network. As the investigation spread across our school campus, so it did across the network. Having a support team, a flood of resources and experts at your fingertips (literally), it is truly an example how learning, research, has changed through the collaboration, connecting and communication tools of the social network era.

Learning, Research, Collaboration, Connecting, Communication are processes (filled with various skills, but content neutral) that are essential in our world. School needs to revolve around process. Content needs to become fluid allowing teachers to use various, seemingly disparate, content pieces to facilitate the learning of processes. I always said that the process I wanted my two children to learn in their first three years of school was, reading. If they learned that process well, they could learn anything they wanted to, as deeply as they wanted to. Let’s make process the engine upon which schools run and let the students play with content.

I hope that made some sense, it is an important soap box.

Photo Credits:

Books: Valentinian at Flicker

Poster: Tale of Two Cities at allposters.com

Skeleton: Silvia Tolisano at “CSI Twitter – Crime Scene Investigation.

Last week #edchat on Twitter focused on assessment, including both formative and summative. Since that conversation there has been a further exchange of ideas. It started with Henrick Oprea (Blog, Twitter) and his post, On Assessment – part 1. His post got me thinking and I responded by posting Thoughts on Assessment: A response. soon after, I picked up a link (via Twitter) to Steven Anderson’s (Blog, Twitter) post  offering his thoughts, “Summative? Formative? I Just Wanna Know What My Kids Don’t . . .” The next day, after brief conversation, Jan Webb (Blog, Twitter) offered her take, “Assessment.” Henrick followed up with “On Assessment – part 2.”

I have spent time letting my thoughts about assessment and this sharing of ideas develop and want to add some additional thoughts to the conversation. I am not “against” assessment. I am against the way assessment is being administered in education today, especially summative assessment. I am reminded of Franks Smith’s comments,

Like memorization, testing has become central to education. Many people, teachers included, can’t imagine teaching or learning without it. 1

Assessment, currently, is primarily a teacher directed activity and focused on a fixed amount of information, learned over a fixed amount of time. It is time to rethink assessment and discover how it can be used to bring relevance back to the educational experience.

Henrick wrote in his follow-up post,

“In the scenario I mentioned, I believe the most influential factors are the mental and physical conditions of the teacher, i.e. rater-reliability. Ask anyone to read and analyze 50 tests on the same topic and provide feedback for each one of them. This is feasible, OK. However, tell this person that he or she will have 4 hours to do that. Even if the first tests are carefully corrected, some issues, such as fatigue, will heavily influence the results of the tests and the feedback given. When I mentioned I can’t blame teachers who have to assess 800 students for not doing it using an alternative to tests, this is what I meant. It’s not the teacher’s fault, it’s just not possible because of the way these schools, inserted in these educational systems, are organized.”

I want to start by saying I understand Henrick’s position, or at least I would like to think I do. Here is what I hear, “Quality assessment, while laudable, isn’t realistic because of the overwhelming nature of evaluating those types of assessments when given to a large amount of students.” It is this dilemma I want to try and address through this post and hopefully offer a way of looking at and doing assessment that alleviates the stress described by Henrick.

Assessment is not a necessary evil, it is rightfully necessary and can be a productive part of a learning environment. However, it is often used inappropriately. The most egregiously uses of assessment would be standardized testing, which has lead to the creation of  a testing culture in education. In the process of growing this culture the system has completely forgotten that students are the reason for the educational endeavor. In my thinking I was reminded of a something Theodore Sizer said,

Tests may usefully tell us what a student can display at a given moment, but can they predict for us the promise of a student’s disposition to use knowledge effectively when faced with important new situations? 2

I think that is a good place to start thinking about assessment. Schools are for the development of knowledge and the skill to use it to generate new ideas. Assessment needs to allow the student and the teacher to determine whether the learning that is occurring is shallow or deep. The contrast is described this way by Daniel Willingham,

We can contrast shallow knowledge [meaning that students have some understanding of the material but their understanding is limited] with deep knowledge. A student with deep knowledge knows more about the subject, and the pieces of knowledge are more richly interconnected. The student understands not just the parts but also the whole. 3

Rarely is assessment used to evaluate whether a student has developed a “big picture” vision of the knowledge they have been guided through. The fractured curriculum we provide for them focuses on preparation for summative assessments that do little to encourage deep learning in favor of memorization of disparate facts that are rarely connected to each other. This seems to be education’s primary approach to assessment, and that is understandable because it allows for easy sorting via grading. According to Rieneke Zessoules and Howard Gardner,

Assessment is typically associated with the possession of information, rather than the mastery of ongoing processes (like learning to write, revise, and take criticism or, even more radically, to integrate the results of a critique into a work). Most current forms of assessment require highly specialized, yet surprisingly superficial, kinds of knowledge.

We test students for what they know rather than what they understand. Yet these skills have little or no relevance beyond the school walls. 4

Summative assessment, in the form of a test, has little effect on student learning other than the creation of stress or ambivalence. Formative assessment on the other hand, when designed and used effectively, has the power to not only influence teaching, but more importantly to provide students real feedback that can help them learn more effectively and internalize their learning in ways that allow them to generate original ideas from their learning.

The achievement gains associated with formative assessment have been described as “among the largest ever reported for educational interventions”. While many teachers incorporate aspects of formative assessment into their teaching, it is much less common to find formative assessment practiced systematically. 5

Steven Anderson provided definitions for both formative and summative assessment from The Florida Center For Instructional Technology at USF:

“Formative assessments are on-going assessments, reviews, and observations in a classroom. Teachers use formative assessment to improve instructional methods and student feedback throughout the teaching and learning process. For example, if a teacher observes that some students do not grasp a concept, she or he can design a review activity or use a different instructional strategy. Likewise, students can monitor their progress with periodic quizzes and performance tasks. The results of formative assessments are used to modify and validate instruction.”

“Summative assessments are typically used to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional programs and services at the end of an academic year or at a pre-determined time. The goal of summative assessments is to make a judgment of student competency after an instructional phase is complete.”

In most instances assessment takes the form of tests or quizzes and summative assessment usually carries the most weight in the determination of a grade at the end of a learning module. Teachers administer tests, use those tests to determine effectiveness of teaching and to sort students via grading. There is little usefulness in the process for students, they might know how they compare to other students, but that is of little value and they discover little about their learning from the experience. That brings me to a significant point:

“Self-assessment is essential for progress as a learner: for understanding of selves as learners, for an increasingly complex understanding of tasks and learning goals, and for strategic knowledge of how to go about improving.” 6

Students must be involved in the assessment process. Teachers can provide rubrics, define learning expectations, and select instances of formative assessment, but students must be provided an opportunity for self-assessment and it must matter. If a student’s personal analysis of their work has no bearing on the “grade” attached at the end of the learning, it sends the message that the only thing that matters is the teacher’s analysis. Henrick commented on this idea, “The ultimate purpose of assessment is to enable [ ] ongoing progress.” Self-assessment is a powerful method of formative assessment. that empowers students through their learning process.

Assessment should occur over time and not just at the end of a learning module. Again, formative assessment is a far better tool for this purpose. In their book, Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, and Curtis Johnson tell the story of senior lecturer at MIT, Steven Spear. Spear, while working on his doctorate, arranged to be trained and then work on the assembly line at one of the Big Three auto plants in Detroit and one of Toyota’s plants. In Detroit, Spear was provided training to install a passenger seat. His instructor went through the entire process of installing a passenger seat and at the conclusion asked if Spear thought he could install one of the seats, Spear was certain he could. The result on the assembly line was nothing short of a fiasco. In an hour’s worth of attempts Spear was successful only four times. The experience at the Toyota factory was significantly different. There, Spear was paired with a trainer who was to train him on a similar process to the one he had done in Detroit. The Toyota trainer established the learning process: there were seven steps to successfully installing the seat. Spear would be trained each step, but would only advance to the next once he was successful with the prior step. The trainer indicated that the learning time was variable. He might learn the first step quickly, in one minute, and then he could move on to step two. However, if it took an hour, that too was acceptable and when he had mastered step one he could move on. The stated goal from the beginning was designed to insure that when he reached the line, he would be prepared to do his task. Needless to say, when he moved to the line he was successful 100% of the time. The formative checks insured he was ready for each level of learning because of mastery of the previous steps. In both instance the summative assessment required the application of learning in a new way – actually installing the seat in a car that would only be in front of him for a short period of time. However, at the Detorit plant where only summative assessment was done, the process failed. At the Toyota plant, the summative assessment was simply assumed due to successful formative checks – in essence no summative assessment was necessary. The authors of Disrupting Class parallel this vignette to education this way:

Student-centric learning should, over time, obviate the need for examinations as we have known them. Alternative means of comparison, when necessary, will emerge.

When students learn through student-centric online technology, testing doesn’t have to be postponed until the end of an instructional module and then administered in a batch mode. [ ] the resulting learning can be much more consistent. [A]ssessment [ ] can be interactively and interdependently woven into the content-delivery stage [ ]. 7

Good formative assessment: based on established expectations; involving the students in planning and implementation; and used regularly throughout a learning experience will insure that “end-of-the-line inspection” is no longer necessary. The sum of the formative checks will evidence mastery. So what then? I suggest some summative assessment.

Of course there is a big, “however” needed following that last statement. I believe we, students and teachers, do need to see something at the completion of a learning module. What we need to see is what our students can make from their learning. When they are afforded the opportunity to innovate and use their imaginations to manipulate and complete the internalization of learning, they can generate exciting evidences of that learning. Summative assessment should be open ended and empower students to innovate. It should be looked forward to and not dreaded. What I am suggesting is an end to testing and a beginning to new processes that empower our students in ways that school should. It is a key idea in rethinking school and centering our purpose around the reason school should exist: students.

1. Smith, Frank. (1998). The Book of Learning and Forgetting. New York, New York: Teacher’s College Press.

2. Sizer, Theodore R.  (1992). Horace’s School: Redesigning The American High School. Boston, MA: Mariner Book.

3. Willingham, Daniel T. (2009). Why Don’t Student’s Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How The Mind Works and What It Means for The Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

4. Zessoules, Rieneke, & Howard Gardner. (1991). Authentic Assessment: Beyond the Buzzword and Into the Classroom. In Vitro Perrone (Ed.), Expanding Student Assessment. (pp. 47-71). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

5. OECD. 2005. Formative Assessment: Improving Learning in Secondary Classrooms, http://www.oecd.org/LongAbstract/0,2546,en_2649_33723_34340421_1_1_1_1,00.html

6. Sadler, D. R. (1993). cited in Brookhart, S. M. (2001). Successful Students’ Formative and Summative Uses of Assessment Information. Assessment in Education. Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 153-169.

7. Christiensen, Clayton M., Michael B. Horn & Curtis W. Johnson. (2008). Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. New York, New York: McGraw Hill.

Photo Credits:

Classroom: Michelle Pacansky-Brock

Sextant: Library of Congress on Flickr

Further Reading:

Reclaiming Assessment by Renee Moore at TeachMoore

Applying PLN – A Continuing Question for Me by David Warlick at 2¢ Worth

I “met” Henrick Oprea (Blog, Twitter) in #edchat on Twitter last night and enjoyed a conversational exchange with him. Henrick is an English teacher in Brazil. The discussion in #edchat last night revolved around assessment and was lively, informative, and a pleasure to take part in. I spent time, following the discussion, letting the conversation mature and develop in my thoughts. I have often had strong opinions about assessment, especially standardized forms of assessment. I think that standardized assessments are disingenuous tools inserted in the educational process from a purely profit motive mindset.

Earlier this year I responded to “It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s us.” a blog post by Dr. Scott McLeod (Blog, Twitter). “It is the test! Or is it . . .” I said commented that:

[Standardized tests are] an analytical tool too often abused and misused. It is not wrong to take regular snapshots of learning, analyze them, and improve practice. The problem arises when these snapshots are given an undo amount of significance in the process of improvement.

I mention this because, I do believe that assessment is a useful and necessary tool. However, I also believe it is rarely used in a way that benefits either the teacher or the student and I mean all assessment, whether standardized or teacher generated. I want to respond to some portions of Henrick’s post, an outgrowth of last nights #edchat, that concerned me – not concerned me about him (he’s a stand-up guy), but because I think they are generally applicable to a wide segment of the teaching force in this country.

“Tests are summative instead of formative, i.e. they aim at measuring and summarize what has been taught through a period of time, and usually come at the end of a unit or a course.”

Tests rarely assess all of the information that is presented and I don’t think that is academically honest? I can remember many times when writing a history test, I would sort through the information that was discussed, worked with, and hopefully learned and the amount should have generate a test of ten pages in length and take three hours to complete effectively . . . so I eliminated content from consideration. It bothered me then, it bothers me know remembering I did it. If a teacher feels strongly enough that a particular point needs to be taught and learned – why leave it off the test? This creates a disconnect in the process of learning that leaves students in a bind. They already feel anxious about testing due to the large influence those test scores have on the way they are perceived and sorted academically (grades). They must try and “remember” it all in the event the teacher asks a question about it on a test, this is why they ask the proverbial, “Is this going to be on the test?” It is educationally dishonest to teach something, require it to be learned when the teacher will not require the student to know it for an assessment piece. It is even more disingenuous if your test carries the most weight in the final grade determination.

“Learners should be able to use their tests results to find out how to improve and what they need to work on.”

If students attend school in order to construct meaning and tests are, as Henrick suggests, a way for them to understand what they know, then why are tests used to determine success or failure in a class (i.e. weighted as part of a final grade)? If a test is a tool to identify gaps, then if it reveals them, why don’t we automatically go back and insure those gaps are filled instead of moving on to the next unit? I like Henrick’s idea that a test can be a tool for understanding what “I” know. However, to be completely authentic, you would have to allow the student time to fill the gaps and then represent internalization of the knowledge. After all, isn’t mastery more important then “finishing the book?” Too often students are assessed in a method that is in direct opposition to the way in which they learned. During the learning process they may be required to work and think as a group; collect, organize, and present information or data visually; or use a method other than “paper and pencil” to evidence their learning. Here’s the problem I see: most assessments are done individually, without student input, and most often with paper and pencil. How can that type of assessment enable students to find ways to improve, both their knowledge base and process skills, much less be authentic?

“Now, it’s not that most teachers don’t want to give students useful feedback, but, depending on the context, it’s simply impossible.”

If feedback, on work that is required, is impossible – where is the academic integrity? Learning is a complex process that requires mental scaffolding provided by the teacher. If a teacher requires a student to learn “something,” facilitates the learning, checks to see if it has been internalized, but fails to provide feedback on the results or teach the student how to interpret the results, their students are not in a learning environment. Action should always result in feedback from the teacher, if a student “does,” the teacher should provide feedback. This demands a very thoughtful approach to the planning and implementing of learning opportunities. If you teach it then assess it. If you don’t assess it, why did you teach it?

“There are classrooms around the world with 50 students, and some teachers have to teach 16 or 18 groups. This means some teachers have more than 800 students. Not only do these teachers have to plan their lessons, but they also need to design and grade all these tests, and they usually are forced to have reports on students’ progress every other month. Now if teachers have 16 to 18 groups of 50 minutes each, they’re in the classroom around 30 hours a week. Add to that all the time it takes to assess students outside class, planning lessons, and being an educator in the core meaning of the word (worrying about each student and his or her learning, and empowering your learners), then you tell me how such an educator would be able to radically change his way of assessing students, going from summative to formative, using portfolios (for instance) instead of standardized tests, or tests made by the teacher him or herself. This means keeping track of 800+ students’ writing. I can’t blame teachers for not doing that. Besides, if a teacher has to assess that many students, there’s the serious risk of rater-reliability issues.”

Steve paints a rather daunting picture and unfortunately, he is right, scenarios like this do occasionally exist. However, teaching is a profession; it is an art to be practiced. We cannot allow such scenarios to divert our efforts at academic integrity and growth. If we throw our hands up and cry, “It is just to big, it can’t be done” then we need to find another career. We are teachers because we believe in (and idealize) the art of learning. We have an obligation to our students, their parents, and our profession to find the answers to rethinking school so that Henrick’s scenario doesn’t lead to mediocrity and burnout.

Assessment, long ago lost its usefulness, getting caught up in a whirlwind of “one-upsmenship.” As an educational tool it was absconded with by those who wanted use it to tout numbers, those who prefer using kids to generate a picture of American supremacy as more important than a picture of students authentically learning. If the goal of school is constructing meaning and internalizing knowledge then assessment should be placed in its appropriate position in the hierarchy of what gets done – near the middle. It should provide students windows on what they have learned, need to learn, and provide them a guiding light to what they want to learn . . . shouldn’t it? It is time for educators to wrest assessment back, place it where it belongs, and rethink school . . .

Update: Steven Anderson (Blog, Twitter) offers additional thoughts on assessment generated from last nights #edchat discussion “Summative? Formative? I Just Wanna Know What My Kids Don’t . . .“

I recently made a new acquaintance (via Twitter), Venessa Miemis (Blog, Twitter), who is “pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in New York City, exploring the intersection between technology, culture, and communication. She is a member of the Space Collective community, and has contributed guest posts to Blogging Innovation, MediaRights, gnovis, and Memebox.” Vanessa maintains a blog that is focused on metathinking, Emergent by Design, it is a great “thinking” blog and a recent post caught my attention. The pertinent part for me was:

For several years now, I’ve been studying the intersection of technology, culture and communication, the impacts of social media, the relationship between creativity, innovation and design, and the potential of various futures.

I’ve had this gnawing sensation at the edges of my mind that all these areas were held together by a common thread, but I couldn’t put my finger on the connection. My intention is that by taking this out of the incubation stage in my head and putting it into words, it will become clarified and provide some value.

First off, let me lay out a framework . My ideas are based on 3 main concepts:

* Social media is fundamentally changing the human experience.
* The world is increasing in complexity.
* We are experiencing accelerating change.

I was especially focused on the three bulleted items:

* Social media is fundamentally changing the human experience.

This is, of course, a very accurate statement that, calls into question the foot-dragging that currently is the method of educational reform. I think it important to state that I am not an advocate of reform. During my twenty-three years as a classroom educator I saw one reform after another be presented in the fall only to find it dead by Thanksgiving.

What is needed is change. Not just painting a new color over the old, but a drastic overhaul. I regularly use the phrase reimagining or rethinking school. The globalization of economies, the disappearance of barriers to global communication, and the rapid expansion of knowledge make Vanessa’s statement a rather obvious reality. However, not so in education. Education is a hot-bed of status-quo, and the institutional creep that describes the method of change in our educational institutions, from kindergarten to our Universities, will insure a continuing free-fall in innovative thinking in this country.

What is needed? We need to “rethink” school. We need to begin with our long-held belief that schools, and education, is one of our greatest accomplishments of thought. From there we need to remove everything from the table and begin to answer the question, “What should be the purpose of schooling?” Put another way, answering the age-old question, “When are we ever going to need to know this?” Students have been asking this from the beginning of school. More often than not, the question is ignored or answered with a flippant, “You just will, I promise you.” If, as educators, we can’t answer that question definitively we have stop immediately and ask ourselves a core question of educational rethinking, “Why, ARE, we teaching this?”

That question reminded me of a recent post by David Warlick (Blog, Twitter), in his post David mused,

It’s the difference between the Sputnik challenge of the ’50s & ’60s and the educational challenge of this day.  My teachers were challenged to educate a generation who would send people to the moon and beyond, to explore the frontiers of space. Today, we are challenged to “Race to the Top.” It sounds good, but what does the top look like? There’s no picture of it to inspire us. There is a vague sense that our children will graduate smarter than theirs — as measured by some Common Core of Education Standards.

This thought accentuates the reality that education/school has lost it’s relevance. There is a small, and hopefully growing, group of teachers whose voice is growing louder all the time, “We have to do this differently.” The difference is not a mere change of apparel, it is a starting over  – buying a whole new wardrobe. As David points out, there was a time when there was relevance and purpose that created wonderment (and unfortunately some fear) within the hearts and minds of students. That is gone. Why? In no small part because of Vanessa’s first statement, “Social media is fundamentally changing the human experience.”

How do we rethink school in an age of such fundamental change? That is a question that educators need to grapple with, not politician’s, not administrators . . . educators. I would argue that, in order to rethink school, school needs to become an “employee owned” ecosystem. Teachers need to be the drivers of rethink and they need to bring their ideas and plans to administrators and if they find a tin ear, on to higher levels. It is no insignificant point that, the policy driving education today is the work of non-educators with ties to corporate interests that see the commoditization of teachers and students as a way to increase the bottom line.

Our discussion must begin with defining a purpose, not for Math or English or History, but a reason that schools should exist. We need to end the fractured thinking that has brought us to this point in the history of American education. No more looking at the big picture and breaking it into its atomic parts, pouring them over our students, and expecting them to be able to put them back together into reality – much less expecting them to even know how, when we don’t teach them how. Rethinking means seeing the big picture, seeing the component parts, seeing them together and designing schools that will actually prepare our students to be able to create their future – to construct meaning and design their future.

Art credit: Hugh MacLeod (Blog, Twitter)

This is the first time I have involved myself in this set of awards. This is also the first time I actually felt qualified to do so. So, here are my Edublog Awards (The Edublog Awards Homepage) nomination suggestions:

Best individual blog: Will Richardson: Webblogg-ed (Twitter)

Best individual tweeter: Steven W. Anderson @web20glassroom Twitter, Blog

Best group blog: Change.org’s Education Blog

Best class blog: Alice Project (Christian Long: Blog, Twitter)

Most influential blog post: David Jakes, Strength of Weak Ties: Me? Obsessed? (Twitter)

Best teacher blog: Wes Fryer: Moving at the Speed of Creativity (Twitter) (Note: You don’t have to have a single classroom to be a teacher)

Best leadership blog: David Warlick: 2 Cents (Twitter)

Best educational tech support blog: Sue Waters Blog (Twitter)

Best elearning blog: Steve Wheeler: Learning with ‘e’s (Twitter)

Best educational use of a social networking service: The Educator’s PLN (Tom Whitby: Twitter)

Best new blog: Venessa Miemis: Emergent by Design (Twitter)

Lifetime achievement: Diane Ravitch: Bridging Differences, (Twitter)

I feel the need to add a category. I don’t know if this is allowed or not, but here goes:

Best Educational Change Blog: Scott McLeod: Dangerously Irrelevant (Twitter)

Posted via web from Cumulative Knowledge

Artwork: (c) Hugh MacLeod (Twitter, Blog)

I just received an Education Week email update and the second article listed was this one written by Betty J. Sternberg. She begins the article:

Consider this description of the work environment of California-based Meebo, one of the Web’s fastest-growing messaging companies, and then ask yourself if today’s classrooms can be described the same way:

“A great team, and tons of meaty problems to solve. … It’s open, collaborative. … We’re facing problems that are pretty unusual. … We take the smartest and most passionate team-oriented people we can find and put them in an environment where they can thrive. We value innovation, teamwork, and good clean fun. … We’re still a small company, so one person can make a big impact.”

She then goes on to say,

“I’ve spent 37 years in education, teaching preschool through graduate students, recently leading a school district as superintendent, and, not too long ago, heading a state agency as commissioner of education. This I know, from watching a multitude of classrooms, pre-K through high school, and from talking to teacher leaders who are in my graduate classes: The culture in most of our classrooms is diametrically opposite to the description of this thriving company. Most student descriptions of a majority of their classes would read something like this: ‘It’s drudgery. We sit alone at our desks and silently answer lots of questions that our teachers tell us look like the ones we will see on the state tests.’”

A very encouraging article to say the least, because at a minimum it presents a more realistic view of current educational reality and the blindered death-grip current educational leadership maintains on status quo thinking and theory. Sternbreg closes with a rather dire prediction:

“We must expand and implement this culture for all our students. They all deserve to grow into extraordinary individuals, not just a record of test scores. If we don’t do this now—finally and with due support and speed—our nation will pay for it soon, and for a very long time.”

What was so shocking was the fact that this story was listed below the main article being pushed by the update, titled, “Role of NAEP Could Change With Common Assessments.”

The article discusses the future of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and contained the following paragraph:

“Now the country stands poised to enter a new testing era. All but two states have agreed to work toward creating common academic standards, with the eventual goal of establishing common assessments.”

The article goes on to discuss new roles for what is often referred to as the “nations report card,” as if education would be lost without the guidance of what, in reality, is the nation’s main tool for legitimizing standardized testing, core curricula, and common standards.

We can’t have both. We can’t create a thriving, innovative, creative, vibrant learning environment and pair it with common standards supported by textbooks and assessed by standardized tests. The two ideas are diametrically opposed. To waste time and money attempting to force these two into a relationship would be as futile as Romeo and Juliet’s parents trying to keep them apart. And remember, in the end their kids died.

It is inevitable that students will learn . . . what is not so certain, is that they will do it within what we currently call “school.” They will find a way to generate environments much like the Meebo description – a place where they can thrive and think and explore and truly learn by doing.

Current educational “reform” is a smoke and mirrors distraction. For decades reform has been a series of piecemeal attempts to do the same thing we have always done, just differently. The real question, “Should we even be doing what we have always done?” is not being asked. What we need, is to reimagine school from the ground up, drawing on the truths we have learned about how humans learn. We need to take what we know about the power of environments that encourage and nurture creativity and innovation and not “reform” school, but finally begin to create what can honestly be called “school.”