Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
About 18 months ago, novice entrepreneur Sue Khim flew to San Francisco from her home in Illinois to take part in an uncommonly public version of a Silicon Valley rite of passage — the pitch. With thousands of other young techies in the audience, she was scheduled to be onstage at the Launch Festival, a showcase for “stealth” startups that have managed to keep their products out of the voracious tech press, or have as-yet-unreleased products to announce.
Launch is more competition than festival. Over two days, tech entrepreneurs pitch to a panel of hotshot technologists who issue on-the-spot critique of products’ market viability and revenue models, and, potentially offer funding.
Khim’s presentation knocked it out of the park, bagging $75,000 for Alltuition, a “TurboTax for student loans.” But within six months, the founders had turned their attention to a new endeavor, entirely fueled by their success at the Launch Festival.
Khim has gone from talking about a potential market of 21 million students to about 20 times that number. And she’s targeting children across the world as young as 11 who are the best among their peer groups at science and math.
It’s called Brilliant.org — an online hub for the world’s most promising young minds to come together, connect, and see how they measure up against one another. Launch judge and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya helped spark the idea.
“There’s a ton of people outside the U.S. that are trying to get into U.S. schools that have no path to figure that out,” Palihapitiya told Brilliant founder Khim after her Alltuition presentation. There also seemed to be plenty of offerings for adults and remediation programs for struggling high school students in online education. But not a place to challenge A and B students.
‘Tantalizingly Tricky And Hard’
So Brilliant is designed for talented 11- to 18-year-olds who would probably be “Googling for hard math problems,” Khim said. Brilliant administers a diagnostic exam to new users, and then begins delivering “tantalizingly tricky and hard” questions written by math and physics teachers, she said.
Because Brilliant’s team assumes their users already have a strong foundation in STEM topics (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the site focuses on measurement, Khim said. She said it considers questions like, “How can we structure practice in such a way that they will understand (a concept) by the end of the practice? And then how do we measure throughout whether they’re on track to understand it or not?”
In many ways, Brilliant mirrors real-world practice settings that high-aptitude kids have flocked to for years: the cram schools where children in India and China prepare for competitive national exams, or Math Circles in the U.S. The idea also emerged from Khim’s own background attending under-resourced schools on Chicago’s South Side.
“My family did not have a lot of money. I grew up in a housing project, and we were on food stamps,” she told me. In third grade, she said, she realized she was smarter than her teachers. Khim figures she wasn’t being stretched intellectually until her family moved and she entered a school with a gifted-and-talented program, allowing her to learn from, and compete with, other smart kids.
Global Competition
On Brilliant, students can participate in this sort of academic socializing on a global scale. The site also brings transparency to global competition. Students can share their answers, and how they devised them, with the Brilliant community — and their social networks. The data can be sifted by geography and age range. In a March demo, six months after launching the site, Khim pulled up a picture of a Filipino student who she says is doing college-level math at age 12, and a 16-year-old in Brazil who she says “probably doesn’t know that he’s in the 50th percentile globally … and that he actually has a lot of work to do.” To date, 90 percent of Brilliant’s users are outside the U.S.
Yong Zhao, associate dean for global education at the University of Oregon, said “globalization has changed a lot of people’s perspectives. Everybody wants to out-educate everyone else. Since we lack good definition of what that means, we think you have to out-score others in some predefined context.”
Zhao said he worries about how American parents might react to international comparisons. But given this rising anxiety, he said, Brilliant’s comparison engine, which allows users to assess their stats against those of peers everywhere, could help to popularize the site.
Brilliant is predicated on the failure of schools to properly stimulate talented students, but one aspect of its revenue model also could be seen as a response to the STEM skills gap, allowing recruiters to tap into a global pool of talent, for a price. A year after Alltuition won funding, Khim was back at the Launch Festival, this time presenting Brilliant. It didn’t take the panel long to make a leap beyond college recruitment. Launch Founder Jason Calcanis asked judge David Cohen, of the TechStars accelerator, to comment on the site’s potential to broker individual sponsorship, like that a Ph.D. student might enjoy.
“Imagine the idea of sort of investing in people,” said Cohen, teasing out the idea of crowdfunding an entire employment trajectory, starting with junior high. “Are the biggest companies interested in doing that? Are there investors interested in doing that?” He mused about having privileged access to the “smartest, most interesting people in the world.”
There are other education sites and initiatives that allow students to publish their results online. The juggernaut online learning site Khan Academy has a system of rewarding badges for a range of accomplishments, from simply watching videos consecutively, to correctly answering problems, and it has a built-in infrastructure for teachers and coaches to view progress. But neither has Brilliant’s focus on top students, key to its appeal for recruiters.
Khim says she’s already hearing that students are listing Brilliant on their college applications. Recruiters say there are many services that purport to increase the flow of talented students, but at some schools, like UC Berkeley, they say they’re already too busy to consider adding new tools.
Brilliant is facing a crowded marketplace amid recruitment-augmenting services. But Khim says colleges, scholarship programs, and corporations have already signaled interest in the access to top-tier talent that her site provides.
Brilliant’s user base is still modest: 120,000, but doubling every eight weeks or so.
“These are the people that tomorrow will be creating the next big tech company, the next great medical breakthrough … that will be sending man to Mars,” Khim said to a crowd assembled at a recent TEDx conference in her hometown of Chicago. Her pitch has evolved, even since March. Now it references a grand theory of massively impacting the economy, and being motivated by the idea of harnessing human capital to notch up an entire country’s GDP. Khim herself is on leave from the University of Chicago to devote more time to building the site.
Meanwhile, the 12-year-old user from the Philippines whom she mentioned back in March won a math competition on Brilliant, beating a 17-year-old who got a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Khim says he’s now being privately coached by a math professor who’s taken him on as a mentee.
Nishat Kurwa is a reporter for Turnstyle News, a tech and digital culture site from Youth Radio.
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“The changes to kindergarten make me sick,” a veteran teacher in Arkansas recently admitted to me. “Think about what you did in first grade—that’s what my 5-year-old babies are expected to do.”
The difference between first grade and kindergarten may not seem like much, but what I remember about my first-grade experience in the mid-90s doesn’t match the kindergarten she described in her email: three and a half hours of daily literacy instruction, an hour and a half of daily math instruction, 20 minutes of daily “physical activity time” (officially banned from being called “recess”) and two 56-question standardized tests in literacy and math—on the fourth week of school.
That American friend—who teaches 20 students without an aide—has fought to integrate 30 minutes of “station time” into the literacy block, which includes “blocks, science, magnetic letters, play dough with letter stamps to practice words, books, and storytelling.” But the most controversial area of her classroom isn’t the blocks nor the stamps: Rather, it’s the “house station with dolls and toy food”—items her district tried to remove last year. The implication was clear: There’s no time for play in kindergarten anymore.
A working paper, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” confirms what many experts have suspected for years: The American kindergarten experience has become much more academic—and at the expense of play. The late psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, even raised the concern in an article for The Atlantic in 1987.
The American kindergarten experience has become much more academic—and at the expense of play.
Researchers at the University of Virginia, led by the education-policy researcher Daphna Bassok, analyzed survey responses from American kindergarten teachers between 1998 and 2010. “Almost every dimension that we examined,” noted Bassok, “had major shifts over this period towards a heightened focus on academics, and particularly a heightened focus on literacy, and within literacy, a focus on more advanced skills than what had been taught before.”
In the study, the percentage of kindergarten teachers who reported that they agreed (or strongly agreed) that children should learn to read in kindergarten greatly increased from 30 percent in 1998 to 80 percent in 2010.
Bassok and her colleagues found that while time spent on literacy in American kindergarten classrooms went up, time spent on arts, music, and child-selected activities (like station time) significantly dropped. Teacher-directed instruction also increased, revealing what Bassok described as “striking increases in the use of textbooks and worksheets… and very large increases in the use of assessments.”
But Finland—a Nordic nation of 5.5 million people, where I’ve lived and taught fifth and sixth graders over the last two years—appears to be on the other end of the kindergarten spectrum. Before moving to Helsinki, I had heard that most Finnish children start compulsory, government-paid kindergarten—or what Finns call “preschool”—at age 6. And not only that, but I learned through my Finnish mother-in-law—a preschool teacher—that Finland’s kindergartners spend a sizable chunk of each day playing, not filling out worksheets.
Finnish schools have received substantial media attention for years now—largely because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA. But I haven’t seen much coverage on Finland’s youngest students.
So, a month ago, I scheduled a visit to a Finnish public kindergarten—where a typical school day is just four hours long.
* * *
Approaching the school’s playground that morning, I watched as an army of 5- and 6-year-old boys patrolled a zigzagging stream behind Niirala Preschool in the city of Kuopio, unfazed by the warm August drizzle. When I clumsily unhinged the steel gate to the school’s playground, the young children didn’t even lift their eyes from the ground; they just kept dragging and pushing their tiny shovels through the mud.
At 9:30 a.m., the boys were called to line up for a daily activity called Morning Circle. (The girls were already inside—having chosen to play boardgames indoors.) They trudged across the yard in their rubber boots, pleading with their teachers to play longer—even though they had already been outside for an hour. As they stood in file, I asked them to describe what they’d been doing on the playground.
“Making dams,” sang a chorus of three boys.
“Nothing else?” one of their teachers prodded.
“Nothing else,” they confirmed.
“[Children] learn so well through play,” Anni-Kaisa Osei Ntiamoah, one of the preschool’s “kindergarten” teachers, who’s in her seventh year in the classroom, told me. “They don’t even realize that they are learning because they’re so interested [in what they’re doing].”
“[Children] learn so well through play. They don’t even realize that they are learning because they’re so interested.”
When children play, Osei Ntiamoah continued, they’re developing their language, math, and social-interaction skills. A recent research summary “The Power of Play” supports her findings: “In the short and long term, play benefits cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development…When play is fun and child-directed, children are motivated to engage in opportunities to learn,” the researcher concluded.
Osei Ntiamoah’s colleagues all seemed to share her enthusiasm for play-based learning, as did the school’s director, Maarit Reinikka: “It’s not a natural way for a child to learn when the teacher says, ‘Take this pencil and sit still.’” The school’s kindergarten educators have their students engage in desk work—like handwriting—just one day a week. Reinikka, who directs several preschools in Kuopio, assured me that kindergartners throughout Finland—like the ones at Niirala Preschool—are rarely sitting down to complete traditional paper-and-pencil exercises.
And there’s no such thing as a typical day of kindergarten at the preschool, the teachers said. Instead of a daily itinerary, two of them showed me a weekly schedule with no more than several major activities per day: Mondays, for example, are dedicated to field trips, ballgames, and running, while Fridays—the day I visited—are for songs and stations.
Once, Morning Circle—a communal time of songs and chants—wrapped up, the children disbanded and flocked to the station of their choice: There was one involving fort-making with bed sheets, one for arts and crafts, and one where kids could run a pretend ice-cream shop. “I’ll take two scoops of pear and two scoops of strawberry—in a waffle cone,” I told the two kindergarten girls who had positioned themselves at the ice-cream table; I had a (fake) 10€ bill to spend, courtesy of one of the teachers. As one of the girls served me—using blue tack to stick laminated cutouts of scoops together—I handed the money to her classmate.
Throughout the morning I noticed that the kindergartners played in two different ways: One was spontaneous and free form, while the other was more guided and pedagogical.
With a determined expression reminiscent of the boys in the mud with their shovels, the young cashier stared at the price list. After a long pause, one of her teachers—perhaps sensing a good opportunity to step in—helped her calculate the difference between the price of my order and the 10€. Once I received my change (a few plastic coins), the girls giggled as I pretended to lick my ice cream.
Throughout the morning I noticed that the kindergartners played in two different ways: One was spontaneous and free form (like the boys building dams), while the other was more guided and pedagogical (like the girls selling ice cream).
In fact, Finland requires its kindergarten teachers to offer playful learning opportunities—including both kinds of play—to every kindergartner on a regular basis, according to Arja-Sisko Holappa, a counselor for the Finnish National Board of Education. What’s more, Holappa, who also leads the development of the country’s pre-primary core curriculum, said that play is being emphasized more than ever in latest version of that curriculum, which goes into effect in kindergartens next fall.
“Play is a very efficient way of learning for children,” she told me. “And we can use it in a way that children will learn with joy.”
“Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.”
The word “joy” caught me off guard—I’m certainly not used to hearing the word in conversations about education in America, where I received my training and taught for several years. But Holappa, detecting my surprise, reiterated that the country’s early-childhood education program indeed places a heavy emphasis on “joy,” which along with play is explicitly written into the curriculum as a learning concept. “There’s an old Finnish saying,” Holappa said. “Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.”
* * *
After two hours of visiting a Finnish kindergarten, I still hadn’t seen children reading. I was, however, hearing a lot of pre-literacy instruction sprinkled throughout the morning—clapping out syllables and rhyming in Morning Circle, for example. I recalled learning in my master’s degree courses in education that building phonemic awareness—an ability to recognize sounds without involving written language—was viewed as the groundwork of literacy development.
Just before lunch, a kindergarten teacher took out a basket brimming with children’s books. But for these 5- and 6-year-olds, “reading” looked just like how my two toddlers approach their books: The kindergartners, sitting in different corners of the room, flipped through pages, savoring the pictures but, for the most part, not actually deciphering the words. Osei Ntiamoah told me that just one of the 15 students in her class can currently read syllable by syllable. Many of them, she added, will read by the end of the year. “We don’t push them but they learn just because they are ready for it. If the child is willing and interested, we will help the child.”
Nowadays, Finnish teachers are free to teach reading if they determine a child is “willing and interested” to learn.
There was a time in Finland—in the not so distant past—when kindergarten teachers weren’t even allowed to teach reading. This was viewed as the job of the first-grade teacher. But, as with America, things have changed: Nowadays, Finnish teachers are free to teach reading if they determine a child is—just as Osei Ntiamoah put it—“willing and interested” to learn.
Throughout Finland, kindergarten teachers and parents meet during the fall to make an individualized learning plan, shaped by each child’s interests and levels of readiness, which could include the goal of learning how to read. For Finnish kindergartners who seem primed for reading instruction, Holappa told me it’s still possible to teach them in a playful manner. She recommended the work of the Norwegian researcher Arne Trageton—a pioneer in the area of play-based literacy instruction.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, kindergarten students like that of the Arkansas teacher are generally expected—by the end of the year—to master literacy skills that are far more complex, like reading books with two to three sentences of unpredictable text per page. “These are 5- to 6-year-olds!” the Arkansas teacher wrote in disbelief.
More than 40 states—including Arkansas—have adopted the Common Core State Standards, which contain dozens of reading expectations for kindergartners. In the United States—where 22 percent of the nation’s children live in poverty (more than 16 million in total)—the Common Core’s emphasis on rigorous language-learning in kindergarten could be viewed as a strategy for closing the alarming “Thirty Million Word Gap” between America’s rich and poor—holding schools accountable for having high expectations for their youngest students.
Furthermore, unlike the reality of teaching kindergarten in Finland where the poverty rate is 10 percent and the student-teacher ratio is typically 14:1 (based on national guidelines), most American kindergarten teachers don’t have a choice whether or not they teach reading. Under the Common Core, children should be able to “read emergent-texts with purpose and understanding” by the end of kindergarten. Ultimately, they’re expected to, at the very least, be able to decode basic texts without the support of a teacher.
“But there isn’t any solid evidence that shows that children who are taught to read in kindergarten have any long-term benefit from it,” Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emeritus of early childhood education at Lesley University, explained in a video published by the advocacy group Defending the Early Years.
“But there isn’t any solid evidence that shows that children who are taught to read in kindergarten have any long-term benefit from it.”
Research by Sebastian Suggate, a former Ph.D. candidate at New Zealand’s University of Otago studying educational psychology, confirms Carlsson-Paige’s findings. One of Suggate’s studies compared children from Rudolf Steiner schools—who typically begin to read at the age of seven—with children at state-run schools in New Zealand, who start reading at the age of five. By age 11, students from the former group caught up with their peers in the latter, demonstrating equivalent reading skills.
“This research then raises the question,” he said in an interview published by the University of Otago. “If there aren’t advantages to learning to read from the age of five, could there be disadvantages to starting teaching children to read earlier?”
* * *
At the end of my visit to the Finnish kindergarten, I joined the 22 children and their two teachers for a Friday event that only happens on weeks when children are celebrating their birthdays. The birthday child that week sat at the front of the classroom in a chair facing his peers and teachers, all of whom sat in a semicircle, and a table with a candleholder to his left.
I expected the celebration to end after the lighting of candles and “Happy Birthday” song, but it didn’t. One of the boy’s classmates, donning a hat that looked like a beret and wearing a mail carrier’s sling over his shoulder, took him by the hand, and the two proceeded to dance as we sang the Finnish children’s song, “Little Boy Postman.”
Once the song was complete, the little postman took out a card and handed it to his classmate. “Would you like me to help you read this?” one of the birthday boy’s teachers asked. “You help,” he responded, a hint that hadn’t quite mastered the skill yet. I watched his face carefully, searching for any hint of shame. I found none—but then again, why should he have felt embarrassed?
The flickering six candles reminded me he’s only a little kid.
US President Barack Obama announces that education Secretary Arne Duncan will step down in December and John King, former State Superintendent in New York, will take his place during a press conference in the State Dining Room of the White House October 2, 2015 in Washington, DC, USA.
“We can’t wait” was Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s frequent refrain. But as he leaves his post this December, his forceful strategy to push dramatic changes to the U.S education system is being tested.
The aggressiveness and urgency that defined his efforts to transform American schools alienated friends and could, in the end, be what derails his reforms.
During his tenure, one of the longest in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, Duncan made a deep mark on U.S. schools with a series of major efforts stretching from early education to college. The administration promised $1 billion in new spending on preschool; spurred states to adopt controversial K-12 reforms such as performance-based teacher evaluations and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards through its Race to the Top grant program and waivers to the No Child Left Behind law; significantly expanded the federal School Improvement Grant program to turn around low-performing schools; targeted for-profit colleges and attempted to increase accountability in the higher education sector; and pushed a proposal by the president to make community college free.
But Duncan’s resignation comes as Congress is deliberating over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind law and considering rewrites that would limit the ability of the education department to get involved in state policy, leaving many wondering whether Duncan’s seven years of intense reforms will stick. Politico reported that “just this week, Duncan said he thought the forthcoming resignation of House Speaker John Boehner would make it more difficult to get the law updated.”
“I can only think that our odds of having it pass now are worse, not better, which is really disappointing,” he was quoted as saying.
He’s also leaving as a bipartisan Senate bill and a Republican-backed House bill seek to limit the federal government’s role in public education and to take aim at policies Duncan pushed, such as teacher evaluations based partly on test scores and aggressive school turnaround strategies.
At the same time, many states are facing growing backlash over the increased emphasis on standardized testing and are slowing down plans to revamp teacher evaluation systems or retreating on Common Core (although some have adopted near replicas to replace it). And the data on the effectiveness of some strategies, including the School Improvement Grant program and new teacher evaluation policies, has been mixed.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, left, speaks during a town hall meeting as President Barack Obama looks on Monday, Sept. 14, 2015, at North High School in Des Moines, Iowa.
Nevertheless, his supporters are praising him for his sense of urgency and forceful tactics. Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor, said he regretted deeply that Duncan is leaving.
“He has placed America’s children and their academic success at the center of his work every day of his tenure, often challenging the most intransigent and powerful special interests in our political system to do so,” Daniels wrote in a statement. “Those who succeed him in this administration and the next would be wise to emulate and extend his example.”
In 2009, Duncan and his department were given access to $100 billion for education in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Often bypassing Congress, Duncan used the money to work directly with states, persuading them to adopt favored policies by providing incentives through Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion competitive grant program in which states were awarded points for adopting ideas such as performance-based teacher and principal evaluations, higher academic standards, and raising charter school caps. Two years later, the administration gave states the opportunity to apply for waivers that exempted them from a federal requirement under No Child Left Behind that 100 percent of American students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
Most states bowed to the pressure. For example, 44 states and the District of Columbia adopted the Common Core, the “college and career-ready” standards created by states but promoted by Duncan.
But as new policies began rolling out, a backlash grew. Progressives protested the increased emphasis on tests. Conservatives balked at the administration’s role in promoting the Common Core standards, saying it was federal overreach that undermined state and local control of public education. And even supporters worried that tying teacher evaluations to student outcomes while rolling out difficult new standards was ill conceived.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is introduced by President Barack Obama, before speaking at Miami Central Senior High Friday, March. 4, 2011 in Miami Fla.
Most notably the national teachers unions — a significant force in the Democratic Party — turned on him. But other allies and even some critics say his reforms will last. “Arne Duncan was one of the president’s best appointments. He has a big heart, cares about children, and I have enjoyed working with him,” Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), one of Duncan’s occasional adversaries, said in a statement. “When we disagree, it is usually because he believes the path to effective teaching, higher standards, and real accountability is through Washington, D.C., and I believe it should be in the hands of states, communities, parents and classroom teachers.”
Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, applauded Duncan for his support of charter schools.
“His leadership on behalf of the federal Charter Schools Program has enabled the dramatic growth in the number of high quality charter schools, ensuring that hundreds of thousands more students now have access to better schools regardless of their family income or zip code,” she wrote in a statement.
Early education advocates were also grateful for the administration’s elevation of early education. “Secretary Duncan’s leadership and unwavering dedication to early childhood education has made an immeasurable difference in the lives of countless young learners,” First Five Years Fund executive director Kris Perry said in a statement. “He has harnessed what all of the research shows about the benefits of investing in early learning, and successfully incorporated it into the everyday mission and policy goals of the Department of Education. We are incredibly grateful to Secretary Duncan for being a champion of American’s greatest resource – its children.”
In higher education, Duncan pushed for income-based repayment of student loans, and recently claimed some success as default rates decreased.
Duncan also sought to protect Americans from for-profit colleges accused of taking advantage of federal funds, with proposed regulations that would stop the flow of funds to low-performing schools whose graduates don’t earn enough to repay their loans.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan (80), of the East team, brings the ball up as West’s Michael B. Jordan (45) trails the play in the first half of the NBA All-Star celebrity basketball game in New Orleans, Friday, Feb. 14, 2014.
“Higher education should open up doors of opportunity, but students in these low-performing programs often end up worse off than before they enrolled: saddled by debt and with few—if any—options for a career,” Duncan said in a statement last year.
President Obama has appointed John King Jr., a senior official in the education department and previously New York’s education commissioner who oversaw the roll out of Common Core there, to serve as interim education secretary for the duration of Obama’s presidency. King “is no stranger to controversy,” as Alyson Klein of Education Week put it, and will most certainly follow Duncan’s playbook.
Duncan had been widely expected to stay until the end of Obama’s second term and the president expressed his “regret and sorrow” that his friend and basketball partner is leaving. “I’ll be honest. I pushed Arne to stay,” he said in a televised press conference.
Duncan plans to return to Chicago to spend time with his family, according to The Associated Press, which was the first to report his plans to resign. He has not decided what his next move will be, but said he hopes to continue increasing opportunities for children in some capacity.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Integrated next-generation technologies may equip students to continue their education their entire lives, and can address three goals: fortifying student skills, increasing education’s ROI, and enabling students to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Education technology providers will likely need to shift their focus from content to connections.
The year is 2021, and 14-year-old Anna dreams of becoming an aerospace engineer. From the moment she wakes up, Anna begins communicating with her personal “wizard,” a phablet with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive analytics features—both verbally and via smart glasses embedded with AI features such as gesture control, facial expression coding, motion tracking, and speech recognition. Anna’s wizard connects via the Internet to the education coordinator (EC) of a government agency dedicated to researching the universe.
“Without a broader vision of social change, new technologies will only serve to reinforce existing institutional goals and forms of social inequity. Many prior attempts to mobilize technology in the service of educational reform have failed because interventions have focused narrowly on the deployment of particular media or technologies, without considering broader social, political, or economic conditions.
“Connected learning is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward expanding educational, economic, or political opportunity. It is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success, or civic engagement. Unlike efforts at educational change that focus on technology deployment or institutional reform, connected learning takes a networked approach to social change that aligns with our ecological perspective.”
– Mizuko Ito, professor in residence, University of California, Irvine.1
The EC is a computerized virtual assistant that helps groom prospective candidates such as Anna by providing job-readiness skills. The wizard shares Anna’s performance dashboard with the EC to create an individualized learning plan encompassing digital content and virtual reality games, experiential learning exercises, and interactive opportunities with professional aerospace engineers in her approved network. Anna’s parents are contacted by the wizard to approve the lesson plan and make any purchases and agreements for Anna to proceed.
Anna carries her wizard to a virtual learning center at her high school. There she works with other students on a two-hour spacecraft modeling simulation in a cloud-based environment, in which students learn by virtually building a life-scale model. This approach allows students globally to both compete and collaborate with each other at different phases, receiving points for speed, accuracy, and teamwork. When Anna has completed the spacecraft modeling simulation, the 3D printer at the learning center produces a miniature model for her. Anna’s science teacher, stationed at another learning center in the school, is connected to the wizard and has automated access to Anna’s work, scores, and activity patterns to offer feedback and guidance on the spacecraft model. Based on Anna’s eye movements, as tracked by her smart glasses, the wizard gauges and communicates interest level and focus to her teacher, who dynamically changes content and delivery depending on where Anna needs guidance. Leveraging the learning center’s adaptive learning system and the learning plan designed by the EC, Anna’s teacher reconfigures her performance dashboard on the wizard to reflect her progress.
Anna can change her learning objectives anytime, and her wizard’s dashboard will dynamically account for all prior work done and align with her new learning objectives. Anna can also share her learning progress with her friends and family via several social media interfaces. The wizard maps her progress and will continue to evolve throughout her journey from primary to secondary school to corporate learning.
The “first wave” of digital education—almost 10 years in the making—focused on creating, sharing, and accessing instructional content in digital forms, including online courses, digital libraries, games, and apps. Digitizing educational content, bringing devices to school, and one-off stand-alone learning apps were basic steps in the drive toward bringing technology into classrooms.2 Despite the initial efforts to digitalize education, K-12 (elementary schools), higher education, and beyond still face three key issues: skills gaps; low return on investment (ROI); and the need for innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation.
1. Enhancing student job readiness and addressing skill shortages:
Graduating students increasingly find themselves underprepared to take on corporate positions. Emphasis on conventional methods of book learning and didactic lectures has resulted in a lack of practical and applied knowledge.3 The needs and requirements of employers are ever changing, further shortening the half-life of skills—acquired through primary, secondary, and graduate education—to five years, and schools and colleges find it challenging to keep pace.4,5 One solution developed has been the Common Core State Standards in the United States, expected to help raise student skill levels in foundational subjects such as basic math and English language.6 Though some schools have adopted Common Core standards, there is less certainty about the actual implementation across all schools by the end of 2015.7
2. Increasing ROI from K-12 and higher education:
Though the United States spends a greater proportion of its GDP on education than other OECD countries, it does not rank among the top 10 in terms of reaping the rewards of that investment.8 Research also shows that 80 percent of adults in the United States consider college education to have poor ROI.9 Rising education fees and the resulting student debt, coupled with the declining quality of graduates’ job readiness, undermine the perceived value of education in the United States.10 Personalizing learning more to the specific needs of each student will likely help generate better ROI from education.11
3. The innovation imperative in a global and competitive workplace:
Macroeconomic conditions have led to a decline in jobs and new firm growth, especially in high-wage industries in the United States.12 These trends are exacerbated by the competitive effects of a global workplace. Innovation and entrepreneurship are vital to driving job creation and economic growth, as exemplified by the life sciences industry.13 In this context, K-12 schools can design specialized education programs to help foster innovation and entrepreneurship at an early age, which in turn will help students create new jobs and carve their own career paths.14
Is technology the answer, or at least part of the answer, to these problems? Many certainly seem to think it is, judging by the investment in educational technologies (“ed-tech”). US education spending doubled over the past 20 years to $1.17 trillion in 2013, and the fastest-growing segment of spending is digital education technologies, which is expected to rise from $23.6 billion in 2014 to $26.8 billion in 2018.15, 16, 17 Since the advent of the computer 35 years ago, learning across schools, colleges, and universities has systematically incorporated technology into the classroom. Businesses, especially, have embraced technology for employee training and development.
Ubiquitous access to learning content has only intensified the need for effective, efficient methods of delivery and utilization.18 Thanks to advanced technologies available today, it is possible to personalize and securely deliver instructional content. As a case in point, Khan Academy’s “anytime, anywhere” educational model delivers personalized learning to students worldwide and even provides diagnostics and dashboards to teachers.19 Some technologies can design adaptive learning methods to offer differentiated learning experiences.20 Nonetheless, merely adding technology to the classroom—which we saw in the first wave of digital education—is not enough to address the impetus for change.
With government, schools, and businesses now demanding connected learning, there will likely be a second wave of digital education.21Participants in the education ecosystem—school administrations, teachers, students, parents, ed-tech solution providers, and government educational agencies—will need to build stronger relationships to create learning environments like Anna’s. Integrated next-generation technologies will likely make it easier for students of all ages and backgrounds to continue their education their entire lives, both inside and outside the classroom.
These technologies can address the three drivers of change: fortifying student skills, increasing education’s ROI, and enabling students to be more innovative and entrepreneurial. To address these challenges, ed-tech solution providers will likely need to shift focus from content to connections.
Three “connectors” are widely viewed as fundamental to digital education:
Connector 1. An integrated digital education ecosystem: Parents, teachers, peers, and administrators, as well as individuals outside the formal educational system such as mentors and potential employers, form a collaborative network to deliver instruction to and guide the student at the center of the ecosystem.
Connector 2. An integrated student learning life cycle: To offer a continuous learning experience—right from K-12 to the workplace—educators and trainers should connect in-classroom and real-world learning in a way that is tailored to the needs, learning styles, passion, and potential of each student.
Connector 3. Integrated technology solutions: Ed-tech solution providers can draw upon their individual technology strengths and competencies to partner and offer integrated solutions.
Through specific case studies and examples, we present how the three connectors can transform the complete learning experience, with ed-tech solution providers acting as enablers.
In Anna’s learning environment, her teacher, peers, parents, and real-world experts come together to provide a holistic learning experience. Similarly, the digital education model is rapidly evolving from transaction-based relationships to an integrated value chain (figure 1). With digital education 2.0, the education ecosystem continues to evolve around students, with their passions and interests at the center. Classrooms may extend virtually to encompass relationships with real-world experts in areas aligned with student interests; with the corporate world through internships and business-based projects; and external innovation hubs such as maker movement spaces, research labs, and business incubators and accelerators. The new ecosystem may also include peer-to-peer social learning platforms that promote open learning and enhance collaboration between students. For example, edX, a joint nonprofit online learning initiative by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, connects like-minded individuals through the latest peer-to-peer social learning tools; Udacity, a provider of online education courses, enables individuals of all ages to collaborate on projects and receive feedback from real-world experts.22
For students like Anna, technology can play a role in integrating all the aspects of their learning life cycle. Connecting learning activities across the various stages of their schooling and careers can help students continually track their learning progress, receive real-time or longitudinal feedback, identify learning needs and gaps, reach out for assistance in a more risk-free environment, and ultimately build their competencies. Technology can help build and annotate an education history based on an individual’s competencies, using different heuristics at different life stages across various subjects and modules. This history can then be used to connect the student to meaningful real-world opportunities.
As students work on real-life projects and link this learning to their formal institutional education, they can earn badges that become competency-based credentials. Personalized tools and techniques, such as PathSource and Pathbrite, can further help a learner manage the various types of content within a lesson plan and across one’s career.27
Underlying both connector 1 and 2 is the third type of connector, the integration between diverse technology solutions to create better learning experiences for students—similar to Anna’s wizard. As a case in point, consider the customizable “toolkit,” a type of universal remote for the digitalization of education.
“Toolkits should allow teachers to address not just what is being taught but how it is being taught—which is different from class to class, from school to school, and from community to community,” says Antero Garcia, assistant professor at Colorado State University.33 “Teachers can use toolkits to cocreate and adapt content real-time to either bolster existing curricula or design a course from scratch, offering an enriched learning experience to students.” With toolkits, students can engage in blended learning: face-to-face classroom methods combined with computer-mediated activities that help students discover and pursue interests at their own pace.
As described by Philipp Schmidt, MIT Media Lab director’s fellow and cofounder of Peer 2 Peer University, “Technology does not replace the teacher but is the glue to connect isolated experiences in support of core values of learning: project-based, peer-supported, passion/purpose-centric, and play-oriented.”34 To that effect, ed-tech companies are collaborating (figure 2) to integrate elements of game-based learning and simulation, experiential learning, augmented reality, and interactive tools as part of their offerings.35 Some partnerships aim to improve the integrity, security, and flow of data between products.36 Others bundle hardware and software designed to help manage a “classroom of devices.”37 Many partnerships offer personalized learning experiences for students and assist in managing their learning goals.38 In addition, infrastructure providers play an important role in facilitating connections among core education ecosystem participants: students, teachers, administrators, and parents. For example, partnerships between cloud companies and learning management system (LMS) providers are helping students and teachers access and supervise learning content virtually anytime, anywhere, on any platform.39
As our case studies have shown, the three connectors address the impetus for change: bridging the skills gaps, increasing ROI from education, and enabling students to be innovative and entrepreneurial. By adopting unique strategic positions with varying depth and breadth across the three connectors, ed-tech solution providers can become catalysts of change for students.
Many educational institutions that benefit most from digital learning solutions are starting to move toward the cloud, upgrading their LMS, investing in network infrastructure, and leveraging social networks for education support and training—all to improve connections across education. In order to capitalize on building and supporting the integrated education ecosystem, executives—including CEOs, CTOs, and product and R&D heads at ed-tech solution providers—should choose a strategic position that captures the broadest possible role in the value chain while exploiting internal competencies or easily acquirable assets.
Ed-tech solution providers should consider the three core needs of an integrated education ecosystem:
Ed-tech companies can consider three strategic positions that meet each of these needs, depending on their solution offerings, competencies, and role in the ecosystem. For each of the three strategic positions, we have identified specific strategic choices that companies can adopt to create value, as well as questions that executives should consider while selecting and implementing a chosen strategy. Our goal herein is to illustrate potential strategic options and related questions rather than providing definitive recommendations and an exhaustive survey, because each company will need to find its own highest-value strategic position.
The foundation builder provides core technology infrastructure and services—the building blocks of next-generation education solutions. The role involves developing next-generation LMS and cloud-based services for efficient data storage, information retrieval, accessibility, and security, by integrating discrete elements such as core technology infrastructure, student information, instructional content, and learning technologies. Cloud technologies can be used dually: to create the base infrastructure and to enable connections. Foundation builders can also use virtual learning spaces, which facilitate the shift from a unidirectional education value chain to an integrated education ecosystem.
As you consider a strategic position within the foundation builder category, here are a few questions to consider:
The content specialist delivers a combination of content creation, content aggregation, and customized delivery solutions on learning devices to ecosystem participants. Traditional content can be transformed into interactive, visualization-rich content to enable learning through experience, discovery, and exploration. Wearable devices can capture eye and body movement to facilitate cognitive learning. Cloud technologies can be used to pull content from diverse sources, curate it, and present it to students in a real-time and engaging way.
As you consider a strategic position within the content specialist category, here are a few questions to consider:
The learning customization provider focuses primarily on providing students and teachers with analytics, advanced learning, and assessment solutions. In the United States, venture capitalists are actively investing in ed-tech companies that offer analytics and LMS solutions, presenting a significant opportunity for these companies. An LMS solution can capture students’ competencies and help them manage their career paths over time in line with their lifelong learning needs. Personalized and adaptive learning solutions can humanize collaboration among ecosystem participants. Technology can be used to “gamify” the learning experience, with badges to reward interest-based learning. Next-generation technologies such as semantic analytics can be used to more closely understand student and teacher preferences, interests, and inhibitions.
As you consider a strategic position within the learning customization provider category, here are a few questions to consider:
Connectors can enable individuals, organizations, and technologies to meet the dynamic needs of new-generation students like Anna. In the coming wave of digital education 2.0, ed-tech solution providers can transform their roles in the value chain from technology providers to solution partners who can help create and foster an integrated education ecosystem. Ed-tech solution providers looking to establish a differentiated position should consider factors such as the standardization of learning platforms, technology security, data privacy, content life-cycle management, and a changing education ecosystem. The choice of a company’s strategic position depends on its role in the ecosystem, core competencies, and optimal business model. Solution providers who consider all these and explore the latest technology trends can capitalize on the imminent wave of digital education 2.0.
Last Thursday, The United States Department of Education held an event at the White House unveiling the 2016 National Education Technology Plan and celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Future Ready initiative. There, along with several partner groups, they announced several new commitments and initiatives to help schools become more digitally capable.
The main theme of the event was connectivity, but that extends far beyond merely connecting students to technology. Instead, the idea of connectivity envisioned for the future is that technology will serve as a means to connect students to teachers, and allow all students to experience the same access to their interests regardless of demographics.
“There’s an answer for every challenge out there,” said Daryl Adams, Superintendent of the Coachella Valley Unified School District, who attended the event. “United in purpose and mission, we can do anything.”
One of the major new commitments from the Office of Educational Technology for Future Ready moving into 2016 will be a set of professional learning resources to help district superintendents and their principals and teachers most effectively transition to digital learning. The main feature of this resource is a personalized playlist of bite-sized videos that will focus on the specific needs of a district. The videos highlight ideal, peer-based stories and practices from a wide range of Future Ready districts across the nation.
Additionally, the Alliance for Excellent Education has launched a new, independent website that will be a one-stop resource for ongoing Future Ready efforts, including ongoing professional learning opportunities such as workshops, partner events, online chats, mentoring and topic conversations all aligned to Future Ready Framework. All of this will be centered on a free online planning tool called the Future Ready Planning Dashboard which helps district leadership teams assess readiness, identify gaps, choose research-based strategies and create a customized digital learning action plan.
During the past year, more than 2,000 superintendents around the country have signed the Future Ready pledge and committed to sharing what they have learned with others. Additionally, more than 44 national and 12 regional partner organizations have committed to helping states, districts and schools become Future Ready. A total of 17 statewide Future Ready initiatives are set to launch as well.
Future Ready coalition partners have been asked to contribute resources that align to the four key focus areas of the initiative, which are Collaborative Leadership, Robust Infrastructure, Personalized Professional Learning, and Personalized Student Learning. Many partners are also launching extension programs such as webinars, workshops, mentoring programs, courses and toolkits to provide support for districts and states.
The Department of Education will also hold five regional summits for Future Ready district leadership teams in 2016, located in Austin, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; Madison, Wisconsin; Seattle, Washington; and Tampa, Florida. Corporate partners Google, Microsoft, Apple and McGraw Hill have committed to provide support for 2-day regional summits and at least four 1-day dashboard training workshops.
“Through collaboration, a robust infrastructure and personalized learning, Future Ready district leaders are shaping the vision for how technology can transform learning for all students,” said Delegated Deputy Secretary of Education John King.
The national plan
The National Education Technology Plan is the flagship educational technology policy document for the U.S. Previously, it was updated every five years, but starting with this year’s plan, the online version will feature comments sections and will be updated over time in order to ensure that examples and language remain relevant.
The main principles outlined by the plan include equity, active use and collaborative leadership to make learning possible anywhere and at any time.
The plan includes guidelines for helping all students, regardless of background or location, stay connected to technology both inside and outside of the classroom. In order to create more money for this, the plan suggests a move away from traditional textbooks towards high quality open license education materials that will stay consistently up to date.
Indeed, even though there is still a need for greater equity of access to technology itself, the department took care to note that it was more important for educators to work to ensure equity of access to transformational learning experiences enabled through the technology.
“It is critical that we embed technology in everything that we do,” said Karen Sullivan, Superintendant of Indian Prairie School District 204. “We need to bring unique experiences to all students, not just families who have the means.”
Thus, one of the commitments most stressed by the report, as well as by many of the Future Ready superintendents in attendance, was the need to better support professional development for educators so that they can use technology to provide personalized learning experiences to students. This means shifting from a single technology course to thoughtful use of technology throughout a teacher’s preparation in order to set minimum standards for higher education instructors’ tech proficiency.
The White House event came just three hours after President Obama’s signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act, representing what the administration considers “unprecedented” alignment amongst federal education initiatives.
“Technology has the potential to bring remarkable new possibilities to teaching and learning by providing teachers with opportunities to share best practices, and offer parents platforms for engaging more deeply and immediately in their children’s learning,” said outgoing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
“This year’s update to the National Education Technology Plan includes a strong focus on equity because every student deserves an equal chance to engage in educational experiences powered by technology that can support and accelerate learning.”
The gloves are off between charter school supporters and the Los Angeles Unified school board. And so far, their clash shows all the calm maturity of a playground shouting match.
Charter schools in L.A. got higher scores on a recent round of standardized tests than traditional district schools, the state’s charter school association pointed out. Oh, yeah? L.A. Unified replied. Our magnet schools outscored your charter schools.
But you included the magnet schools for gifted children, the charters retorted. Uh-huh, said the district, but even taking out those programs, the magnets beat you.
Neener-neener.
This tacky exercise in one-upmanship follows the recent disclosure of a dramatic, $480-million expansion plan to double the number of district students attending charters. It’s not surprising that such an in-your-face move by charter school supporters — who want half of all L.A. students to be in charters in eight years — has set off a wave of anxiety among the district’s teachers and officials. They have legitimate reason to worry: Charters draw more-motivated and higher-achieving students, so they often leave traditional schools worse off, with less money to serve more students with behavioral problems and disabilities.
Hence the aggressive response. Board member Scott Schmerelson recently characterized the planned charter expansion as “an insult” to teachers and “an attack on democratic, transparent and inclusive public school governance….” His colleague Steve Zimmer called it a “hostile takeover.”
But if the district really wants to fend off a charter incursion, its best bet is not to ramp up the angry rhetoric but to create and build the kinds of public schools that attract and keep students. Parents whose children are happily enrolled in orderly, well-run neighborhood schools, or exciting magnet schools, have little reason to switch.
The expansion plan is not an insult to anyone. It’s a boon for kids and their parents, who will have new and, we hope, better choices. The district has its own stable of outstanding magnet schools — and some regular public schools that are showing signs of major improvement — and charter supporters should not be trying to diminish their reputations. As with charter schools, there are waiting lists for district magnets. So why isn’t the district, which still has too many underperforming schools, rapidly expanding its popular magnet program?
To his credit, Zimmer tried to do exactly that with an expanded Mandarin-language program in Mar Vista, but NIMBY forces shut down his plan.
Earlier this year, when he was running for school board, Schmerelson had this to say: “Charter schools are here to stay. Let’s not fight them, let’s embrace them…. My goal is to build up our traditional public schools to the point that parents and students would have a difficult time in deciding between a charter and a traditional public school.”
That’s a smarter philosophy than his recent slam.
via Powerful Learning Practice
Have you ever gone to the doctor with a rather vague problem? The kind of problem that has no obvious solution?
“Doctor, my elbow hurts.”
“Doctor, I have a runny nose.”
“Doctor, look at this rash.”
From that ambiguity, we expect our physicians to narrow down something that could have a thousand origins to the one specific cause, then make it all better with one specific treatment. It is not just physicians that we expect to have uber-problem solving skills either. Many of the people we run into in life are asked by us to solve our hazy dilemmas.
We tell the mechanic: “My car is making a funny noise, can you fix it?”
A quarterback asks: “What’s the best play to run, coach?”
We might ask a decorator: “I need help redoing this room. What can be done with it?”
We might ask friends: “What do you think is the best car for me to buy?”
Some of our ambiguous problems are mundane: “What toothpaste should I use?” or “What should I have for dinner?” On the other hand, some of our conundrums are much more life changing: “Should I get married?” which leads to “Whom should I marry?” which leads to “Should we have children?” which leads to all kinds of other ponderables. Mundane or life changing, they are all problems to be solved.
The better we are at problem solving, the better chance we have at making a proper decision when the time comes and being successful in both our personal and career pursuits.
From our first activity in the morning until the last thing we do before we visit dreamland each night, we are constantly engaged in a series of problems to solve — some easy, some hard. Problem after problem after problem. Question after question after question. Simply put, life is a series of ambiguous questions to be answered. The better we are at problem solving, the better chance we have at making a proper decision when the time comes and being successful in both our personal and career pursuits.
Some of the questions we have pretty much solved long ago and have placed them into our routine of daily life: The best route to drive to work each morning, the team we should root for, even the types of food we like to eat and how much time we watch TV. But even the most routine of things that we do each day were at one time, problems to be solved. That route to work that you drove this morning was at one time a question for you to answer. Should you drive this way or that? What were the advantages of each route? This route may be shorter, but there is always a morning back-up. This route is longer, but traffic flows more smoothly. I think I will go this way. Problem solved.
So what’s this got to do with school?
Problems like these are not like problems we give our students to solve. Problems we traditionally give to students have a single correct answer (think multiple choice, true and false, and fill in the blank). We spend, an inordinate amount of time teaching students how to find the the “single-answer-that-is-the-correct-answer.” While that might be good in the short term, and easy to grade, in the long term I believe we are doing them a terrible disservice.
As one of my colleagues once stated, we might be practicing educational malpractice. By not teaching and pushing our students to develop problem solving skills, we fail to prepare them adequately for life outside of school. We are “preparing” them, in fact, for a world where the questions and answers are pre-packaged and easy to bubble in. And that world does not exist.
Problems like the ones I’ve mentioned above are called “messy problem” by some educators and “ill-structured problems” by others. Messy problems have no single, certifiably correct answer. There is no “one right way” to solve a problem like “should I get married” or “what should I study in college?” The answer is the goal, but the answer can manifest itself in many correct ways and lead to a lot of unexpected learning along the way. Ambiguity envelopes us. It begins at birth and follows us through to the last days of our lives. Start to finish, life is messy.
I love ill-structured problems. When offered in a classroom setting, they present students with real life situations and devilish dilemmas. Problem based learning, a methodology begun in the late 1960’s in medical schools in Canada (and expanded into K12 education in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s) was developed after medical experts in teaching hospitals could not understand why otherwise excellent interns froze up when real life humans were placed in front of them with real life problems (there might even be panic and bleeding).
After long investigation, if became clear to instructors that while the students were “book smart” and could recite page after page of diagnostic information from memory, most patients did not present their symptoms in a way that matched the book: “You know Doc, my elbow hurts just like the description on page 354 of the Jensen Ortho text,” said no patient ever.
We need to move away from the pedagogy of the single answer and move towards teaching the messy problems of Problem Based Learning. This is different than Project Based Learning (as I wrote about here), where the end goal is already known (and thus a single correct answer is reached in many cases). Life does not work so much like a project; human development is pretty much Problem Based Learning. The best outcome or solution is usually not known when the problem is presented. Sometimes it is, but not often.
In pursuit of the messy answer
Moving towards messy answers to messy problems is not just a matter of shifting the way we test (although that’s a messy problem in itself). It’s first and foremost a shift in the way we expect our teachers to teach and our students to learn. We cannot in all honesty think that students can possibly be prepared to solve life’s messy problems when for years all they have been taught to do was look for the single best answer on the standardized test. (Watch out for those distractors!)
I love ill-structured problems. When offered in a classroom setting, they present students with real life situations and devilish dilemmas.
Consider these current very messy problems now facing the nation:
How should education be reformed?
What is the best way to handle gun violence?
What should be done about how the government spends money?
What should be our response to global climate change?
And on and on and on…
We have seen what happens when groups of people have little or no problem solving skills: Nations go to war. Religions fight. Congress cannot talk to the President. Gun owners cannot talk to gun control advocates. Husbands cannot talk to wives. Students bully each other. All of these snarls and snafus are directly the result of a pervasive lack of problem solving skills among the populace.
When problem solving (and its twin sister critical thinking) isn’t business as usual, then charlatans and conmen can easily manipulate a situation. If you don’t believe that this is true, consider the current highest rated show on cable’s History Channel, “Ancient Aliens,” a program that is neither historically accurate nor even close to being scientifically factual. Yet millions watch this show which, somehow, every week, links obscure cave drawings, religious texts, nut job theories and tin foil conspiracies into stories of how our ancestors were the spawn of human/alien mating. (Great-great grandma was a Klingon. Get used to it.)
As our students grow up and enter adult life and work, those with a lack of problem solving skills will be at a distinct disadvantage to those who can solve problems and detect flimflam and flummery. And those who realize there are many “correct” ways to solve problems will have a great advantage over those who believe there’s a single answer for each and every question.
Let’s start reform here!
Education reform — a topic that we have now been discussing since forever, according to education-historian-turned-reform-skeptic Diane Ravitch — must actually begin somewhere. I suggest this: Let us take a good hard look at the curricula and standards that are now out there. Let us agree on a common set of goals, and let us at least consider the idea of making true problem-based learning part of the standard curricula for grades K to 12 and beyond.
Yes, it’s messy and harder to teach. Yes it takes more time. But if you truly believe that clichéd phrase hanging on the wall in your school somewhere about preparing students for the future, and how they will be future leaders, then you have to know, deep down, that just teaching kids to take tests is not preparing them for anything other than just taking tests. Nobody will pay you for that for too long.
If we can teach kids to solve messy problems before they graduate, they might not have such a hard time solving messy problems when they start running the world. Or trying to figure out what is wrong with my elbow.
(And they will start running the world, you know. That’s one question we can be pretty sure has a single answer.)
