Our digital profiles and the lifelong task of curating them

In this education future-cast I look at how a new lifelong task of curating our digital profiles, along with increasingly sophisticated employment testing, relate to identity formation and the mission of educators. It calls for authentic self-discovery of an individual’s gifts and temperament.There is a risk of cautious conformism. What if someone’s best potential is somehow related to a way of not ‘fitting in’? How can teachers help guide young people into this new world?

Students’ Use of Mobile Devices for Learning

Mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, smartwatches) might not have been around when you grew up, but they are going to be on the educational scene from now until… forever. And on balance, this is going to be a good thing.

I say that even though I’m quite cautious and skeptical about the digital world children enter into nowadays. I am dismayed when I see a five-year-old plunked down with an iPad, playing games for hours on end. As far as I’m concerned, that kid’s mind is far better served by being engaged in the world around him/herself, especially plain old leaves, dirt, sticks, grass. If that’s not available, a book to look at, an art project, building blocks. I don’t believe parents genuinely hand their kids these electronic devices to make them smarter – what they’re doing is buying some time off from minding the kid. And that’s totally understandable and okay! 

Yet… I’ve come to think that a period of ‘mindlessly’ watching TV – my own parents’ answer to the kid time-drain – is in some ways better than a tablet, especially when good videos are selected by the parents. Sure, kids’ TV is passive, and often not very enlightening. But my concern with tablets and the like is that these devices are so immersive that they are certainly shaping the brain of their young users, in ways we don’t even understand. Later on, we’ll see that the time they spend checked out of the real world and into the virtual shaped their character – in ways we don’t yet know. It’s an experiment. Young minds are malleable, and there are many ways our modern world drives a kind of distance between us as we grow up that would be alien to earlier generations. 

Okay, that’s my skepticism, and it is mostly concerned with the exposure of the youngest ages, say up until 8. But let’s consider the world of the 7th grade teacher. Pretty certain, every kid in his/her class will have put in substantial time on an interactive device – a game console, a computer, a phone, a tablet. They’re natives. It’s no good denying it; now the question becomes, how do we channel the time they’re going to spend online anyway into activities that are most beneficial, most educational for them? There are a couple of tricky parts to this: How to slip that objective in there without making it boring and easily rejected in favor of a favorite game? And how to know that the activity is beneficial? 

For the teacher, these are such crucial questions, because as soon as the kids are out of the classroom, these digital diversions immediately become their go-to activities. What we want is market share in their head space (permit me some jargon; it’s actually serious, because that’s what all the advertisers in the world are grappling for, 24/7). Building some of this digital/mobile activity into homework and classroom activity is the way to take some of that territory.

Conversely, because of their already-blossoming “addiction” to these devices, allowing the students to engage in absorbing problem-solving and learning activities on them is a surefire way to increase the students' interest in and commitment to the business the class is conducting. Don’t you suppose they’d rather work on that iPad assignment than the one that requires them to crack open a book or put pen to paper?

We should also bear in mind that the fields of authentically researched and validated project-based learning and educational gaming are coming into full renaissance now. Increasingly, researchers and developers are producing online activities that are substantially outperforming traditional means for teaching certain subjects, as measured by resulting test scores. For learning certain things, the digital game medium is just better than a great teacher in the same room. 

And there’s efficiency: as a teacher trainee, I’ve been assigned a lot of online reading, videos, and such. When I’m commuting or standing in a line, I can just pull out my phone, access my next reading assignment, and get right to it. That convenience makes me want to do it right now, because I know I’ll have to take care of it at some point, and right here and now I have some time to burn. Later, it’ll surely get in the way of whatever else I’d rather be doing. 

So, teacher, how best to seize this opportunity?

•  Only do what is reasonably accessible to all your students. The activity must reduce the “digital divide” (by which less privileged kids get less access), not increase it. If it fails this test, don’t do it.
• Make it project-based. Learning through projects that require problem-solving sticks far better than rote learning, and digital media can excel at this.
• Make it game-based. A good game requires experimentation, and delivers stages of advancement and reward that propel the learner forward.
• Test it out. You need to avoid technical hindrances that could derail an otherwise great project.
• Go with what’s proven, and with what works for you. Rely on what’s been tried and well-reviewed; and if you have a different reaction, move on to something else.
• Make the kids figure it out. They are your best resource for finding ways to keep the project moving forward – they are natives, after all; they enjoy the challenge; and they learn from it.
• Go with easy. If something isn’t working, reach for the alternative. Better yet, rely on your kids to do that.
• Make the kids help each other. Collaboration should be built into the assignment. And more advanced students should get credit for helping others who need guidance.
• Make it measurable. There should be good ways to assess what’s been learned.

So, what’s a good mobile-based activity? Likely it will be exploratory and collaborative, and engage students’ problem-solving skills.

I recently led students in a “functional geography” activity, in which they used tablets to capture photos and audio narrations to describe particular locations and the purposes for which they’re used. Then they sent this field material in, and edited it together in a voicethread. This was a project that involved creativity, collaboration, and quite a lot of problem-solving as they worked out how to get the material onto one device, then send it to another. They learned to act fast, to find work-arounds when they hit a roadblock, to perform, and to use their devices in productive ways they’ve never encountered before.

A friend of mine has his students create a podcast about some aspect of their family history. While much of the editing might happen on a laptop, the capturing of this material is most easily done with any mobile digital device that can capture sound and send it elsewhere. And when the student needs to transcribe the interview, s/he can easily do it at home using this device, not having to wait for one of the two computers in the classroom to become available. The efficiencies these devices enable make the project more practical to achieve in a reasonable amount of time, without getting tangled up in technicalities. 

This stuff isn’t the future; it’s the present. And with a bit of inventiveness, combined with a thoughtful consideration of educational objectives, it’s going to make for better schooling.

Special Education Referrals in a Westchester School District

I spoke with the lead special education administrator of a school district in Westchester County, New York, Kristie. It was the first week of school and she was pressed for time, so one of the strong impressions the conversation left me with, in addition to her obvious professionalism, was how much specialized jargon was flowing off her tongue. Since it’s all new to me, I was scrambling to keep up as she gave me a quick introduction into how special education is a highly regulated, highly organized system with crucial accountabilities.

A student may be identified for special education referral either by the parents or by school staff, and these two paths each have their own requirements. In either case, the staff takes an individualized approach to determine what sort of supports they can build appropriate for the student.

Much of what happens in the referral process is mandated by state and federal law. For example, the Response to Interventions (RTI) spells out a clear process to follow, beginning with collecting data that would demonstrate initial eligibility. The RTI process will move the student into one of three tiers. But Kristie made clear to me that the state does not dictate how they intervene, such as what courses they provide. For example, the district has a special resource room for intake called Bridges, which is not based on any legal requirement, but is modelled on their own choices of best practices.

And this goes some way to explaining the school administration's directive for special education. The administrators make it their business to continually analyze their continuum of services, from the least restrictive, most inclusive ways available to other approaches as needed. This is a well-resourced district with the capacity to keep an eye open for innovations they can add, in a field that seems to be in a state of ongoing development, with a steady stream of new research, assistive technologies, and piloting methodologies.

If the student is “classified” as a result of the referral, s/he is then under the responsibility of the Committee on Special Education (CSE) and is given case manager. The whole process of evaluations and committee reviews ensues. If not, their case is sent back to what they call the “building level,” meaning the team of educators in the student’s school building, who manage this student along with all the others, though one presumes with a closer, more specialized level of attention.
Students identified for special education are provided with a continuum of services at the elementary and secondary levels, ranging from teacher-direct interventions to out-of-district placement if necessary. The CSE team determines what’s appropriate in each case, including social-emotional developmental needs, and develops a plan to suit.

Parents are deeply involved. If the referral is initiated from within the school, parents are informed early and kept aware throughout the process. Either way, once a student is classified, consultations with parents are a constant feature, with weekly conversations at a minimum between a learning specialist or psychologist and the parent, and a robust online portal providing the parent with extensive access including real-time tools.

I was curious about the social-emotional component of a special education student’s predicament, whatever their particular needs may be. The philosophy overall is to take a student-centered approach, in which students take responsibility for their own learning and development to the maximum extent. They seek to enable student activity that is less directed by the teacher, more self-directed.

I then spoke to two veteran high school teachers from the same district. When I asked Dean and Renee how they identify a student for special education, it became apparent that that rarely happens at the high school level – almost always, the referral will already have been made in earlier grades. So students tend to come under their supervision already under the management of the CSE. The teachers then tend to jump into an RTI process that is already well defined.

As they get more involved in the case, they observe actively, and when they notice things, they bring their findings to the team meetings to talk about it as a group. They then try approaches in the classroom that they have reason to expect to be of value. They then collect data and go through several cycles of reporting and adjusting. When something isn’t working, this triggers them to try a different level of intervention, and this escalation may continue as long as necessary.

The teachers know a student is struggling when they see poor reading comprehension; a student who is grades below age in reading & writing; and obvious problems with math comprehension. They most often attribute these observed qualities to slow mental processing and weak memory. They recognize that there are many causes of these conditions – neurological, hearing impairment, learning difficulties, and often physical causes.

On the subject of emotional handicaps, I thought both teachers initially indicated that they tend to stay away from handling that. When I sought a further explanation, they clarified that it’s not that such cases go untouched, but rather that emotionally fragile kids are handled more as the special province of psychological staff, such as clinicians who conduct psychological testing and work directly on conditions like anxiety. They also noted that in their experiences, the attempt is made to address such conditions earlier, in middle school.

I asked whether referrals ever seem to come as a surprise to the parents. Again, this is not a process these teachers handle much, but they think it rarely comes as much of a surprise to parents of student at the high school level.

When I asked whether alternate methods of instruction are tried before referring the student for special education, the answer I got, which really referred to the RTI, indicated to me that at the age they’re teaching, students are pretty clearly segregated already in the minds of the teachers into those who have been classified in special education and those not. They did describe how highly individualized the RTI approach is for each student. It might involve calling the parent once a week, making a homework schedule, giving the kid more attention if s/he’s having hard time reading. Their perspectives seemed to be very much formed by the RTI process, with its weekly committee meetings examining different cases; a large reference list of different interventions depending on the student; and an iterative process of the committee recommending an intervention, the teacher and student trying it, and reporting back.

What I have reported here may not be news to the reader, but for me, as I have not been involved in any of this before, it was quite an education into both the formal process and the perspectives and approaches of teaching and administrative staff concerning special education. Attending to special needs has to be a significant chunk of a teacher’s time, and the collaborative accountability is quite intensive. I think that a teacher has to adopt a really positive attitude about his/her contribution to the student’s growth to incorporate this special attention seamlessly into his/her complete range of responsibilities. 

Beacon City School District Demographic and Achievement Performance

Here's a little look at how Beacon's young students stat up:

What is "Innovative Teaching and Learning"?

"Innovative Teaching and Learning" is a buzzword set of practices in education these days, backed by Microsoft research and advocacy. Here's an infographic giving a brief overview of what it's about:

One important finding backing up this approach is that the quality of an educator’s assignment strongly predicts the quality of the work that a student does in response. Greater than 90% of variation in student work scores was accounted for by differences across assignments, not by differences across students for the same assignment.

Brief History of US Education Law Pertaining to Student Testing

How have federal education laws acted to move us to today’s testing/assessment regime?

Here I look at four laws:

• Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1965 (ESEA)
• Goals 2000: Educate America Act, 1994
• The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)
• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)

... and you'll see how since the 1980s, the direction towards more testing with the purpose of enhancing school accountability has been continuous throughout different presidential administrations.

Why are the Common Core Standards So Closely Linked with High-Stakes Testing that Many Parents Find Onerous and Odious?

It seems to me that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are tightly fused in the public’s mind with increased and more stringent standardized testing, and that this close association with testing has created a lot of resistance to Common Core. Here in New York that's certainly the case, with this year (2014-15, the first year common-core-oriented tests have been introduced) 20% of students/parents opting out of the testing.
 
I've been holding a minimally informed view that the standards are a reasonably good idea undermined in the public perception by being saddled with contentious assessments that may be serving other purposes entirely. I wanted to take a closer look. How real is that linkage between CCSS and onerous assessment? What caused that perception to arise? And how are the major educational organizations responding to it? I looked at the websites of some of the major US educational organizations to find out. 

I began with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, because it gives the appearance of being the central online advocacy force on behalf Common Core. So I was surprised to find it did not have a lot to say about the assessment side of the coin. They emphasize that data collection is not required, but up to each state individually. Perhaps they are reluctant to wade into the controversy, but if so, my casual observation of P.R. strategy tells me they’re dropping the ball, because the perception “out there” is so strong that Common Core is all about the testing and “teaching to the test.” And that’s ironic because, by the definition of Common Core’s learning objectives, one would expect the methods for assessing achievement to be quite different from and more meaningful than the customary, rote-questions, fill-in-the-bubble methods. They need to address the controversy if they want to make a stronger case for CCSS and help get it through this difficult roll-out.

Before going any further, it’s worth quoting this concise statement by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) as to what Common Core is basically about:

The Common Core State Standards have the potential to transform teaching and learning and provide all children with the problem-solving, critical-thinking and teamwork skills they need to compete in today’s changing world. This approach to learning moves away from rote memorization and endless test-taking and toward deeper learning.

The AFT is very supportive of Common Core. But they strongly assert that there is a need to extensively field-test the assessments before rolling them out. They make the comparison with how businesses methodically field- and market-test their products before introducing them, to prevent commercial failures. The implication is, why would education administrators handle such a large and important “product roll-out” any differently, and risk blowing the necessary positive impression and goodwill? They suggest a moratorium on the testing, asserting that it is too rushed, and they also argue against jumping into using test result to determine such things as student advancement or penalties or rewards for school performance.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to make this comparison, but this “botched roll-out” thing reminds me of the drastic effect the failed opening days of the Obamacare online exchanges had. It just gives the whole project a bad image, painting program elements that are totally unrelated to the testing problem and otherwise potentially easily accepted with the same discolored broad brush.  

The National Education Association (NEA) stakes out a position close to identical to the AFT’s. They are very opposed to high-stakes testing, and one gets the sense they are representing a group of teachers who are weary not only of having to teach with these test in mind but also of being associated by default with standardized testing, as if it was somehow their idea. They propose delaying any testing until the teaching side is rolled out smoothly. Indeed, they published an article back in 2012 expressing concern that when the tests arrived, they could undermine the effort to establish Common Core.

All these organizations point supportively to the “next generation of assessments” being produced by Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) for some states and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) for others. I did not find either the SBAC or PARCC website particularly informative on the subject of the timing of initial testing and what effect is was having on public support for the Common Core, but at least PARCC was direct and explicit in stating that their assessment project is all about supporting implementation of Common Core. 

So at least they are not abashed about it, and I get the sense that they are earnest, research-based, and creative about getting the assessments right. But they do not seem to address the issue of timing or argue that allowing more time to pass would be a good thing. I imagine that, like the Obamacare administrators, they have been under tremendous pressure to get it done and out yesterday, to (theoretically) lend credibility to the whole project and generate an evidence base. But that pressure is probably also coming from political interests wanting to use results to “incentivize” schools and teachers, long before the linkage between test results and appropriate consequences can be demonstrated.

PARCC has an interesting description of how the two major evidence-based principles on which the standards are based are focus and coherence. It is not my topic here and I don’t have time to discuss it, but they do a careful and effective job of explaining how this is a rational and testable basis to do assessment better than it has been done in the past.  It lends confidence about the project in the long term, but will they get there before the political winds change, weighed down with negative impressions?

I presume PARCC and SBAC are predominantly researchers into effective educational methods and assessment design, rather than interest groups pushing for testing in the ways it is sometimes used to reward and punish schools and teachers. It’s not clear whether or not they are supportive of the immediate requirement of using the tests in the initial implementation of Common Core standards.

So who is? I’m guessing it’s political leaders more than anyone else, but to finish my roundup, I took a look at the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). A section of their website titled “Standards, Assessment & Accountability” ties these subjects more closely together than any other source I examined. By “Accountability,” they mean consequences for professional educators and institutions for their results. So I’m guessing they have a strong interest in seeing to it that these three aspects are very tightly knitted together. They do come across as a group of technocratic believers, particularly in their statement about accountability, which seems to be their culminating, unifying concern – and which likely plays best with the political class. No mention of a testing moratorium there.

Citations:

Tim Walker. (October 16, 2013). 10 Things You Should Know About the Common Core. Retrieved from
http://neatoday.org/2013/10/16/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-common-core/

Tim Walker. (December 11, 2012). Beyond the Bubble: Schools Get Ready for Common Core Assessments. Retrieved from
http://neatoday.org/2012/12/11/beyond-the-bubble-schools-get-ready-for-common-core-assessments-2/

Common Core State Standards Tools & Resources. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.smarterbalanced.org/k-12-education/common-core-state-standards-tools-resources/

FAQs about the Common Core State Standards. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.aft.org/education/common-core/frequently-asked-questions

Glossary of Terms. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.parcconline.org/resources/parent-resources/glossary-of-terms

Myths vs. Facts. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/myths-vs-facts/

Principles Regarding the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. (2105). Retrieved from http://www.parcconline.org/resources/educator-resources/model-content-frameworks/mathematics-model-content-framework/principles-regarding-the-common-core-state-standards-for-mathematics

Standards, Assessment & Accountability. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.ccsso.org/What_We_Do/Standards_Assessment_and_Accountability.html

Testing. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/59488.htm