The Multi-layered Curriculum: Why Change Is often Confused with Reform

… once states adopt curricular frameworks in science they will have only a passing similarity to the science content and skills that teachers will teach once they close their classroom doors. In the real world of age-graded schools, pedagogy, assessment, and professional development are thoroughly entangled while the official curriculum too often sails above the clouds loosely tethered to what happens in classrooms.

Larry Cuban finds four layers of curriculum in schools:

1. The “official,” state-mandated curriculum

2. What teachers teach

3. What students learn

4. What is assessed

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What Can the U.S. Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

We should not ask whether Finnish educational model would work in the United States or anywhere else. The question should be: What can we learn from the Finnish experience as high performer and successful reformer?

Finnish lesson is that good policies and overall well-being of people, including poverty reduction, are the corner stones of sustainable educational success.

Pasi Sahlberg (by way of Larry Cuban) underscores the key lesson from Finland, that a demonstrated alternative exists to test-based school accountability systems. The Atlantic also wrote on the topic.

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Study: Class size doesn’t matter

… we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research — frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations — explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.

If this becomes the new conventional wisdom, then independent schools will need to update their marketing messages. Independent schools are generally well-positioned to speak to highlight teacher feedback, tutoring, and high expectations and perhaps less well-positioned for data-informed instruction and increased instructional time.

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Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools

Teachers are resisting, saying that they prefer to employ technology as it suits their own teaching methods and styles.

Legislating computer use, especially if it results in teacher layoffs, would generate a strong reaction, wouldn’t it?

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LiveBinders Comes to the iPad

Sorting Out an Avalanche of iPad Apps for the Best of 2011

Free Tech for Teachers and The New York Times offer some quality app selections that may work well for schools. I am especially interested in presentation tools for organizing content, whether for student portfolios or other, more short-term purposes.

LiveBinders  Best of 2011

In contrast to their own title, the authors find identify seven critical discovery skills that can be developed. They are not unchangeable qualities of innovators.

1. Association
2. Questioning
3. Observing
4. Experimenting
5. Networking
6. Challenging the Status Quo
7. Risk Taking

Networking particularly offers new potential in an information age. Active participation in electronic networks increases one’s connectedness to professionals in other institutions, leading to more powerful professional development opportunities, school visits, and personal connections.

Interestingly, the authors find immersion in a foreign culture to be a common trait about innovative CEOs. Living in another country increased leaders’ abilities to connect disparate ideas and imagine new possibilities.

Associating—or the ability to make surprising connections across areas of knowledge, industries, even geographies—is an often-taken-for-granted skill among the innovators we studied. … Conceptually, as innovators increase the number of building-block ideas, they substantially increase the number of ways they might combine ideas to create something surprisingly new.

Christensen et al find that creativity is not a fixed trait. Rather, one can develop it through practice. In addition, behaviors precede changes in attitude. Frequently engaging in discovery skills leads to conceptual change. This is one model for how a leader can develop a culture of innovation in one’s school.

In independent school discussions, creativity and innovation are sometimes mentioned in the same breath. This may lead to a focus on the arts as the principal source of instruction for creativity in the school. The authors find that creativity alone does not necessarily lead to innovation. Innovative leaders desire to change the status quo and take strategic risks put creative ideas into practice. Schools should therefore see innovation as a school-wide initiative, perhaps led by an interdisciplinary team but certainly not based in just one discipline.

Why do institutions resist change? The authors fault the “status quo bias, the tendency to prefer an existing state of affairs to alternative ones.” Innovative leaders shun the status quo, whereas delivery-oriented leaders focus on execution and risk aversion. Certainly this is true in most schools, where administrators, teachers, parents, and students find comfort in long-held models of what education should look like.

In schools, aversion to failure may also have to do with the costs of mistakes. Failed classroom experiments affects kids’ learning. However, I would personally rather model bold experimentation and occasionally hit the jackpot with a transformative learning activity than consistently organize good but uninspiring lessons.

Though most of the book’s analysis applies equally well to education as to business, the book’s treatment of education itself leaves much to be desired. One paragraph alone describes The Met’s internship-based program, one of my favorite examples of reimagining school. Sir Ken Robinson earns a mention.

Source: The Economist

Is this simply due to the low rate of return on social media fundraising appeals, or does a crowd effect exist, so that individuals are more likely to give because they see their friends give?

Independent schools are increasingly focusing on beginning teacher training programs. Also check out the Catlin Gabel/Lewis and Clark teacher intern program and the Progressive Education Lab (Calhoun School and others).

CTE Resident Teacher Program Director Part-time position – .5 FTE

free professional development | focus on teaching and learning| forward-thinking discussions |educators from all types of schools, grade levels, and subjects | highly participatory | wide range of topics

Info and registration: http://edcamppdx.wikispaces.com/HOME

Are repetitive drills dull and unhelpful? Willingham explains that repetition builds automaticity, which in turn serves as a foundation for higher-order thinking skills.

Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge (although they become much less so when we become quite experienced …).The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.

In other words, students need to hold a certain amount of information in working memory in order to synthesize and analyze. This contradicts the popular claim that memorizing facts is unnecessary now that we have the Wikipedia.

Speaking of Wikipedia, the online encycopedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, sides with Willingham.

To claim that the Internet allows us to learn less, or that it makes memorizing less important, is to belie any profound grasp of the nature of knowledge.

If public intellectuals can say, without being laughed at and roundly condemned, that the Internet makes learning (“memorizing”) facts unnecessary because facts can always be looked up, then I fear that we have come to a very low point in our intellectual culture.

Willingham drives a stake through learning styles, finding no evidence that an individual can be primarily a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. NPR made a story of this in August of this year.

Why doesn’t Anne learn better when the presentation is auditory, given that she’s an auditory learner? Because auditory information is not what’s being tested! Auditory information would be the particular sound of the voice on the tape.What’s being tested is the meaning of the words. Anne’s edge in auditory memory doesn’t help her in situations where meaning is important.

Although NPR pitched this as a death knell for learning profiles, Willingham does support the teaching of material through a variety of methods, to allow students to use different mental processes to understand meaning and to “start fresh and refocus his or her mental energies.”

Willingham offers little for teachers to help students who don’t like school. Use metaphor, so that students use existing memories to acquire new knowledge. Organize content that is neither too hard nor too easy for each student. These answers will not likely satisfy the practicing teacher. Surely, we can do more for uninspired students.

Like metaphor, story has the potential to tap strong mental pathways when used as a teaching method. The story format of setting the scene, presenting a problem, and working toward a conclusion is familiar and engaging. This may be why the superb lecture remain a powerful teaching technique, and students adore some traditional teachers and abhor others.

Willingham also takes aim at the idea of teaching students to think like experts with a statement that is likely to rankle progressive educators.

Expert scientists did not think like experts-in-training when they started out. They thought like novices. In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training.

[Experts] have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories, and those representations are abstract.

Willingham concludes that schools should focus on basic skills and automaticity, so that students build a strong foundation for the subsequent development of expertise.

Willingham’s advice is easy enough to accept. Focus on foundational knowledge and skills. Set high standards. Develop and employ pedagogical content knowledge. I would expect all good teachers to do these. However, the most effective teachers go far beyond these basic techniques. Foundational knowledge can include traditionally omitted content areas that have increased relevance for students today, such as economics, statistics, and psychology. Instruction for higher-order thinking skills can indeed begin in school if properly organized and developed. In fact, some higher-order thinking skills such as creativity are abundant in the early years of schooling but weaken due to deemphasis in school.

Willingham buys into a binary view of education that is all too common in the popular press. Educational styles are not limited to traditional and progressive. Experienced teachers understand that foundational knowledge is essential to build reasoning skills. Then sophisticated teachers also develop authentic contexts for learning that have evident meaning for students. They organize instruction for higher-order thinking without compromising foundational knowledge and skills. Willingham’s analysis should not imply a “back to basics” approach, at the risk of decontextualizing instruction and further alienating disengaged students.

8:30am  Maru-a-Pula student exchange discussion

9:00am  IT department meeting

11:30am Communications meeting

1:30pm  Stanford Online High School and Global Online Academy

3:00pm  Knight Scholars Program seminar development

Progressive education emphasizes student experience, construction of knowledge, thinking about learning, and the development of lifelong learning. Progressive educators worry that too many students have lost interest in the conventional curriculum, particularly at the high school level. Schools can design more engaging, effective programs that appeal to all learners.

I first started teaching directly after college in a teacher intern program at an independent boarding school. I taught two sections of ninth grade Biology and met daily with an experienced teacher mentor. I was pretty unprepared to teach but did my best to convey and assess the content. When I walked past the classroom next door, I was often captivated by the discussions in Bill Z.’s ecology class. Students developed questions about the campus pond and then designed independent research projects to answer those questions. Class time was spent at the pond, over lab equipment, or in group discussion. Students were highly engaged, defying the stereotype of the non-AP kid. I wondered whether I could make my classes this engaging.

I took my next teaching job in Botswana. The curriculum there was not progressive, tied to the U.K. O-level and A-level programs. However, the school itself was imbued with a strong social justice orientation, founded on non-racial principles during the height of apartheid South Africa. After school activities commenced at 2pm, and students were required to pursue sports, service, and clubs equally. I have not yet since seen a school with such a comprehensive commitment to community service. Global citizenship and cultural competency have since featured prominently among my educational values.

The Stanford University School of Education provided me with access to the study of experiential education, educational equity and school change theory. Nine months of intensive study with experienced professors and student peers helped me develop a comprehensive internal framework for my view of education. I wanted to design educational environments to enhance student experience, assess learning, and prepare students for a democratic society.

I took my next position at a San Francisco public charter school that had opened only the year before. Coming on board in the school’s second year was a real adventure in painting, lab construction, curriculum development, and building new information systems. Growing a school from one grade level to four required a ton of work and many long days. It also provided an opportunity to found a school on new assumptions about students and learning. I have never experienced a stronger commitment to success for all students, experimentation with teaching methods, and heterogeneous student groups. These principles of educational equity became permanently ingrained in my educational philosophy.

Becoming a technology director helped me further explore progressive educational methods using technology tools. I came to see so much potential for electronic tools to connect learners and prepare students to fully participate in a democratic society. Schools that feature students as content creators and teachers as facilitators came to feel so possible, if not likely. Expansive electronic information sources, online discussion forums, multimedia publishing, communication networks could be used to support full student participation and experiential learning.

My current school embraces the term “progressive” in both public-facing materials and internal discussions. We highlight so many examples of active student exploration of knowledge, reflection about one’s own learning, interdisciplinary study, 21st century themes, and school as community. Global education, urban studies, outdoor education, and sustainability all have a place in the curriculum and often dedicated staff. The school also has a tremendous arts program, truly an equal to the other departments and a statement about the vital importance of instruction for arts literacy, creativity, and discipline.

Progressive education has played a significant role in my education history, but it is not the only relevant theory of practice. In the next post, I will explore cognitive psychology and its effects on my conception of learning theory.

We covered the following questions:

- Why did Catlin Gabel join the Global Online Academy?

- How do independent online school options compare, particularly in their teaching strategies?

- Can online high schools support a culture of inquiry?

- Is student-student dialogue an advantage of online learning or an obstacle to overcome?

- How does a rubric approach help schools evaluate their progress with investigating online learning?

For the second question, we compared Global Online Academy, Online School for Girls, Stanford EPGY Online High School, and George Washington University Online High School.

Students who have their account within a Google Apps domain are better off. The Apps domain administrator creates accounts, does not report user age, and bears responsibility to ensure the privacy of student information. Google expects schools to secure parent consent for under-13 use of Google Apps. At a minimum, Google stores each student’s name and email address, but of course the account will also include content that the student has uploaded in the course of their work.

Google Apps domains are not just limited to schools. Any domain owner can set up a free Google Apps domain, though these are limited to 10 user accounts, and advertisements are displayed. Buying a domain and setting up free Google Apps allows a family to take greater control of the services and comply with parent consent requirements. Low-cost web hosts make it easy to buy a domain name for the family and use GMail.

What about Google+? Google has just added Plus to Apps, but only for higher-education institutions.

Google provides a form to request access but state that this is not for elementary and secondary schools.

Facebook requires users to report their age when setting up a new account.

Many students falsify their age, often with the support of their parents. Both children and parents want to gain access to the social networking platform in order to keep in touch with each other, relatives, and friends. Companies routinely do not create a way for parents to provide consent for a child to create an account, and in turn for the company to collect information about the child. Facebook also does not provide the option for a school to to administer student accounts with parent consent. I also wonder what lesson students are learning from their parents’ encouragement to falsify their age.

With knowledge expanding exponentially and technological access to that knowledge morphing daily, schools are reassessing their essential structures and roles. Recent brain research has converted some hunches into certainties, while throwing some challenging questions to educators the world over. In short, we are learning about how students learn best. Some forms of learning are almost universally effective, and some need to be tailored to individuals’ unique styles. We must therefore convert our schools, perhaps fundamentally, to allow for new and appropriate methodologies of learning.  

“Convert our schools.” That’s pretty strong stuff, embracing change to ensure the continued relevance of an educational program. I would love to learn more about how the school reached this point, how pervasive is the commitment to this vision, and what it looks like in practice.

Somehow, Google can remove my site immediately and without warning, but they require weeks to consider my request for reinstatement. Google has moved with equal speed on underage GMail accounts, but at least they provide a way for a credit card holder to quickly recover the account.

Paradoxically, I am enjoying life without Google Search. For one, this confirms the fallacy of stat watching. As much as half may have resulted from the cloaked content in the site. Many blog were from unrelated Google searches or automated indexing engines.  Now, my pageview stats reflect who actual humans who came to visit my site on purpose.

Am I worried about my personal identity disappearing from Search? My digital footprint stretches across multiple sites. It is still easy for people to find me. I also host this website myself, so if I never were able to rebuild this site’s Google reputation, I could copy all of the content to a new blog.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate that you are here.

Check out the thoughtful topics discussed at today's edCampPDX (detailed descriptions online). Free professional development, facilitated by participants!

Got Books? Using Technology to promote reading and Children's/YA Literature
Writing Across the Curriculum in the Digital Age
Interactive YouTube videos: Created for the world by kids
Writing and Science and Formative Assessment
Tools for Building Classroom Community
Crank up the Critical Thinking using VoiceThread
Throwing Out the Lesson Plan: A Writing Teacher Goes Rogue
Dream School Commons: A Community-Based Effort to Re-Imagine Education
Teachers Controlling Students: Why autonomy support is better and how to tell the difference
Dream School Realized: Extremes in Child-Centered Pedagogy
Selection Bias v. Self-Selection Bias
How do the connected devices get organized around the campfire?
"Know Thyself" – Valuing Reflection
Meet Common Core State Standards with Visual Thinking and Learning
Online learning roundtable discussion
How does attention blindness affect your teaching and learning?
Instant Formative Assessments: How do we know what they know?

Read the student’s reflection about the role of cellphone photos in his life.

GOA aims to preserve the unique qualities of independent school education: small class sizes, close teacher-student relationship, an inquiry focus for instruction, and a challenging curriculum. So far, courses are living up to expectations. The teacher-student relationship is particularly rich in the online format. Most of the teachers hold a weekly Skype chat session with each student. This quite possibly creates more one-on-one attention than a student receives in a face-to-face class. On the other hand, students report having a harder time building relationships with other students, given the absence of common time together.

One of our own faculty members is a founding teacher in the Global Online Academy. His course, urban studies, immediately became comparative urban studies when it went online. Previously, students studied the city of Portland and collaboratively designed an urban improvement project for a specific neighborhood. Now, each student designs an independent urban improvement project for her city. The huge added benefit: students get to represent their own city in comparisons among the members of the class!

It has been exciting to participate in preparatory meetings and the launching of this new consortium. I cannot recall in my career ever witnessing such a close, creative collaboration among ten independent schools. Our schools are notoriously independent, yet we created a new, joint teaching and learning structure together. From our school’s point of view, we represent GOA course work as a full transcript course, because we helped to shape the program. We do not represent in this manner courses that students take through other online schools.

Will GOA grow to the point that most Catlin Gabel students take an online course, or will it remain a small niche option for specific circumstances? Each semester that passes will bring a new opportunity to monitor the popularity and effectiveness of this form of schooling.

Photo source: iStockPhoto

An upgrade to PHP version 5.3 broke our Drupal 6 Image FUpload plug-in. Apparently, this problem was discovered two years ago and has not yet been entirely fixed. Not coincidentally, the Image FUpload project is seeking a new maintainer.

Fortunately, the SWFUpload project is in better shape, so we switched to it this weekend. Project usage statistics confirm that at least a thousand other site managers have made the same decision.

Both modules rely on the same SWFUpload Google project, so they operate in similar fashion. SWFUpload seems simpler and behaves more consistently than Image FUpload. Previously uploaded photo gallery images are stored and presented by ImageField and FileField, so past photo galleries do not depend on the choice of uploader.

What batch image uploader will be available for Drupal 7? Neither Image FUpload nor SWFUpload has a Drupal 7 version in development. FileField is now integrated into Drupal 7 core, so perhaps a partial rewrite is required for one of these modules to advance to D7.

Many thanks to Drupal community developers for your work. This project would not be possible without you. If you are interested in automatically creating Drupal users based on LDAP accounts, check out my contribution to the LDAPsync module.

Certain school traits are nearly universal. High schools generally follow a liberal arts curriculum. The teacher-student relationship is highly valued. At the same time, no two schools are identical. Schools have different measures of success, and they use different methods to get there. Understanding many different schools helps one learn that there is no “one best system” (Tyack). Staff who work in a single school for many years run the risk of concluding that their model of a successful school is better than others.

One school may have a laptop program and a Smart Board in every classroom. Others may rely on laptop carts, tablets, or few computers at all. One school may consider athletics a premier program, another school puts it on the same level as community service, outdoor programs, and global trips. Schools differ in the lengths of their terms, administrative positions, block schedules, academic departments, advisory structures, and so on. How the program is executed is more important than the configuration of these structural components alone.

Accreditation also provides one of the few formal accountability measures of an independent school. Of course, independent schools are ultimately accountable to their families, who can express satisfaction or displeasure with their feet. A board of trustees also provides high-level accountability in the form of school governance. Accreditation is more comprehensive and direct in its observations than any other method. While losing one’s accredited status is unlikely, the school formally presents its program to an external body for review and gains an opportunity to reflect in a manner that may inform future decisions.

This year, our school is writing its own self-study, and next fall we will host a visiting team. We have begun our process of validating the mission and explaining how we organize the program to embody the mission every day. This winter, our IT Team and Co-curricular Innovation Council groups will write two sections of the self-study, summarizing key program aspects and identifying opportunities for improvement. We should emerge from this work with a more coherent sense of who we are and specific strategic directions for the future.

Image source: iStockPhoto

Specialist instructors are a hallmark of independent schools. Tuition payments supply generous budgets, funding teaching positions in the arts, technology, and co-curricular programs: instrumental music, vocal music, painting and drawing, drama, ceramics, film, graphic design, animation, technology, library, outdoor education, global education, urban studies, community service, diversity studies, and more. Students experience a wide array of course work in many disciplines, enriching their education and broadening their horizons.

Schools with many specialist classes must work especially hard to achieve program coherence. Homeroom and specialist teachers must form strong grade level teams so that students experience a reasonable degree of consistency in purpose, values, instruction, and assessment, or else risk confusing students with contradictory expectations and rules. Teachers must regularly exchange information about students, so that each teacher understands the whole view of each child. Administrators must take care to maintain equal emphasis among programs, as specialist teachers work hard to develop events, seek community recognition, and justify their positions.

Specialist courses can only be good for students, right? Not necessarily. Providing students with such a number of classes and teachers can shortchange the development of core skills and fragment the student experience. The demands of scheduling specialist classes reduces homeroom instructional time for younger students and encourages older students to carry a heavy course load. Passing periods fragment the weekly schedule, as students travel from one building or classroom to another.

Most importantly, teachers in all disciplines must teach reading, writing, math, and higher-order thinking skills. If they do not, then students in the best-funded schools will receive less instruction in these foundational skills than their public school counterparts.

The school that does these things can create the ultimate instructional program, rich in a full range of intellectual pursuits while also intently focused on the child’s development of essential skills and habits of lifelong learning.

CatlinSpeak: speak.catlin.edu

MAP Voices: mapvoices.org

I worked a bit with the CatlinSpeak staff, and a few thought-provoking questions came up.

What is an “issue” in an online format?

The staff plans to publish four paper issues and some additional number of online issues. To simulate an “issue” on the website, the initially planned to schedule all of the posts to publish on a specific date. In reality, it was too difficult to troubleshoot design and layout without publishing the first batch of articles immediately.

The online format forces some shifts in thinking. When breaking news happens, why not publish it to the site immediately? Major news websites no longer publish issues but rather post articles continuously as they are written. Can a school newspaper generate enough traffic without announcing new issues? Can students devote focused attention to writing and editing amongst their other school commitments?

How can we get students to read more serious articles?

CatlinSpeak had a terrific launch day as measured by site traffic, nearly 2,000 hits in a single day. However, look how steeply traffic dropped off after the home page.

Serious articles about global travel, the presidential election, etc. only received low double-digit hits. How many of those read the articles all the way through?

How much technical website expertise should a journalism class develop?

The CatlinSpeak staff had high standards for layout and design but was not able to take on the CSS customization required to make the necessary changes. Given that the design is likely to stay relatively static now that the site is launched, how important is it for the staff to develop CSS skills, compared to spending time on journalism and publicity skills? Is it okay for adults to do most of the CSS work at the start of this project, to help the staff achieve a good launch?

What collaboration is possible between Maru-a-Pula and Catlin Gabel students?

We have two student newspaper staffs writing serious articles about their schools and communities. How should they collaborate together in ways that will be worth the effort required? What could students learn from the similarities and differences in their journalistic priorities and methods?

What is the role of social media in these online papers?

The Catlin Gabel staff chose Twitter for a very practical reason: the ease of posting links to external news articles and Catlin Gabel sports scores. They are not really using it for networking, but it is effective for presenting updates quickly and concisely.

Journalism and 21st Century Skills

This year, CatlinSpeak changed from a club to a half-credit lunch class. This promotion underscores the legitimacy of a journalism class within a classic academic program. That said, why not fully integrate the class within the English department’s elective or required course of study? Communication, presentation, and global citizenship are key 21st century skills. Why not five them full status in the school curriculum?

As co-curricular programs have evolved from mere “activities” to fully-fledged experiential learning environments, it has become more important to coordinate these programs and build stronger connections between co-curricular programs and classroom teaching. Students often refer to outdoor trips, robotics projects, or urban planning presentations as their most memorable learning experiences. Why should they experience dramatically different teaching styles between classrooms with and without four walls?

Organizing program directors together allows us to strengthen what we have in common: a focus on 21st century content domains (global citizenship, environmental stewardship, technology, etc.) and skills (communication, collaboration, creativity, etc.). Facilitating ways from program directors to work more closely with classroom teachers creates potential for more experiential learning opportunities within classroom instruction. Our classroom teachers have been creating terrific experiential learning opportunities for years. Now they get more potential partners and conceptual support for their project work.