By Esther Wojcicki Chair of the Board, Creative Commons, Journalism/English Teacher, Palo Alto High School
Here is a pretty shocking statistic.
More than 40% of teachers today are disheartened and disappointed in their jobs according to a study just released by Learning Points Associates. It is hard to be an inspirational, caring teacher if you don't want to be there.
The study showed that seven in 10 teachers cited testing as major drawback and 61 percent also cited lack of support from administrators and nearly 75% cited "discipline and behavior issues" in the classroom.
This is a very challenging situation for policy makers because the solution to the education crisis in our country is the teacher. Last week Michelle Obama wrote an article in US News and World Report that was entitled "Teachers are Key to a Successful Economy." I couldn't agree more.
The Gates Foundation also came to the same conclusion after spending years focusing on small schools. They are now focusing on teacher effectiveness.
As a long time teacher at Palo Alto High in Palo Alto, CA and someone who has seen multiple education fads come and go, I think thought leaders have finally come to the right focus -- the teacher is the key. No matter what books are provided, no matter what curriculum is required ... the key is how the teacher feels about what she is teaching and how she treats her students.
I am sure everyone can remember a teacher they liked, but they can also remember a teacher they disliked because the teacher seemed to dislike students. Students know when a teacher doesn't want to be there; they know it just by being in the classroom. It's not fun. At one point these teachers probably liked students and teaching, but they now somehow feel trapped in a job that no longer provides the same pleasures it once did. These teachers actually don't dislike students; they dislike what they are required to do-- teach to a test, like NCLB tests, year after year and work with ineffective administrators.
Over the past eight years teachers nationwide have been teaching to the NCLB test which is why many of them are disheartened and burned out.
No matter what policy makers dictate, when a teacher closes the door and is the classroom alone with the students, he/she is in charge. If the teacher is well-trained, then the students will learn more. If the teacher is happy to be there, then the students will be more content in the classroom. The teacher sets the tone; the teacher provides the activities; the teacher plans the day. Happy students work harder. Happy teachers teach more effectively and that is what we need---effective teachers.
It sounds like an old adage, but what we need to do as a nation is to support teachers in the classroom and modify the NCLB Act which is now up for Congressional renewal. Supporting teachers is key to our success as a nation. Support means supporting increases in teachers salaries, respecting the role of teachers in society, donating money to foundations that support teachers, volunteering to work in the classroom, and modifying the NCLB Act to so that teachers are not motivated to teach to the test.
This post is the first of a series by Ms. Wojcicki published in the Huffington Post.
Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to her MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she'll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often as she can. While she misses television and movies, she says she just can't find the time.
This describes what we can call Tashawna's distributed learning network, the most important places in her life where learning occurs. Not just at home, school and church but also through digital media, like MP3s, SMS and social networks, and at youth-serving institutions, like Global Kids and FIERCE. Some are places that require her presence, like school, while others are opt-in, like MySpace. But the learning she gathers across the nodes in her network are preparing her to succeed in the classrooms, workplaces, and civic arenas of the 21st Century.
And Tashawna is not alone. In part due to the changes in education, in part due to the affects of digital media, youth have a wide array of options for learning knowledge and developing skills. But how many youth feel in charge of their networks, or are even aware they exist as an interconnected whole? How do they learn to synthesize what they learn and communicate it to future employers and college admission staff who won't learn of their strengths on most school transcripts?
Global Kids, an afterschool program in New York City that supports youth like Tashawna to be global citizens and community leaders, has begun to explore just these questions. More specifically, we are increasingly asking the following: What do youth need to understand and strategically navigate their distributed learning networks? And how can youth-serving institutions support youth to document the associated learning that address 21st Century Skills that so often go unrecorded?
We are far from alone, however, in raising these concerns. For example, a number of recent initiatives supported by the MacArthur Foundation (from whom we too receive funds) are concerned with the distributed nature of learning experienced by today's young people and the challenge for both youth and learning institutions to integrate and assess it. While digital media has been a disruptive force supporting the fragmentation of learning environments it yet remains a potential source for coordinating and synthesizing the experience.
One approach to empowering youth to be more in charge of their learning and make more sense of their distributed learning network is to focus on youth's existing assets through both digital tools and offline activities to help them see the contours of their networks, understand their role as they traverse their learning nodes, and enhance their abilities to make connections amongst them. The following describes artifacts from three approaches Global Kids has undertaken to further explore these important issues.
Distributed Learning Maps
I was able above to describe Tashawna's distributed learning network because she showed it to me, on paper. It looked like this:
Actually, this was her second drawing. She didn't like her first because she was concerned it wasn't original. The first one looked like this:
When I first viewed these I paid attention to how she chose to group certain nodes. I noticed the distinctions between informal learning institutions and the formal, between portable digital media and online.
Of course, Tashawna doesn't walk around with a drawing of her learning network. I don't think she'd even thought about all the places she learns before I'd asked her to draw these pictures. But when I did it was easy for her to list on a sheet of paper places like home and school. I had to push her, however, to list all of her portable media devices, web sites and after school programs. She wasn't used to thinking about them all as sites of learning. After each one I asked her what she learned from that node:
Me: What do you learn from texting on you cellphone? Tashawna: How to spell bad! (laughs) Me: What else? Tashawna: How to use technology more effectively to communicate.
At the end of the process, as a representative of one of her learning nodes, I was left with a broader understanding of Tashawna's network, of the resources she brings into our program, and where her learning with us might affect other sites of learning. From Tashawna's perspective, I hope she began to think, perhaps for the first time, about herself as a participant within her network, as the final source creating meaning by synthesizing the collected learning, and as the one ultimately responsible for learning how to best design and navigate her network, now and in the future.
Digital Literacy Transcript
Even if Tashawna could fully articulate the learning she receives outside of the standard school curriculum, how can she communicate it to others, in a capacity more formal than a college essay? Last year, we worked with Henry Jenkins' Project New Media Literacies to create something which might do just that: a Digital Literacy Transcript. Henry Jenkins has identified and described the core literacies afforded by new media tools that are essential for full participation in our new digital age, such as Simulation, Negotiation, and Multitasking. Last year, Global Kids developed and implemented a curriculum that used social media to sharpen their literacies while assisting youth to understand how to think about them.
Below is Tashawna's transcript by the end of the school year:
The Transcript turns each literacy into a triangle-shaped badge. Each corner represents a different relationship with the literacy: I can recognize it, I can talk about it, and I can do it. At the beginning of our program each youth's Transcript was blank. Over the course of the program youth watched their Transcript grow as badges were earned through completing social media projects in the program while also submitting existing work (fan fiction, podcasts, etc.) that demonstrated evidence of their existing competencies. For example, you might note that Tashawna completed her "negotiation" badge, was working on her "networking" badge, and never began "performance."
The Transcript served as both a feedback mechanism to motivate and guide learning and an alternative transcript to show colleges or prospective employers about abilities which would otherwise go unrecognized.
Digital Literacy Portfolio
How could a college or potential employer viewing Tashawna's Digital Literacy Transcript know that she actually learned the referenced skills? And for those new to the terms - which, to be frank, are most of us - what could she do to make these concepts clear and concrete? Enter the Digital Media Portfolio. Each Portfolio is personally curated by youth like Tashawna to offer an audio and visual tour of their social media productions that highlights the literacies developed through each social media project. This stands in contrast to the Digital Transcript, which is official and controlled by Global Kids.
Below is Tashawna's:
Global Kids is new to these three approaches - Distributed Learning Maps, Digital Literacy Transcripts and Digital Literacy Portfolios - but this year will expand them in a variety of contexts. The new MacArthur Foundation-funded Edge Project will allow us, as part of a broader initiative, to bring the Learning Maps into civic and cultural institutions that use digital media for learning. Meanwhile, the Transcripts and Portofolios will be rolled out in Winter 2010 within the New York City Public Library. Over the course of the next two years we will be documenting this work and sharing our findings with the broader community.
Program Officer, Open Educational Resources The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Often when we think about innovation, we focus on lots of low cost rapid prototypes and bottoms up design driven approaches. You don’t often hear much about how policy could stoke innovation. Usually, people think of policy as stifling innovation. I actually think there are opportunities to shift policies that could significantly promote innovation. Here are a few areas of opportunity on the near term horizon:
Textbook Adoption to Resource Adoption
Most states have incredibly archaic and restrictive textbook adoption policies. The sad irony is that these adoption cycles are being lengthened from seven to nine years in many states, when the rate of change and innovation in the world is dramatically increasing (imagine what an 8 year old textbook on science and technology looks like today). Shifting these processes to include digital resources is critical. This not only allows us to begin to move from paper based textbooks to new digital environments, but it can also serve as a distribution channel. Much of the feedback we get from teachers is that searching for educational materials online leads to a mediocre mixed bag of results. The state can play a role similar to what they do with textbooks in evaluating digital resources, aligning them to standards and providing at least a baseline for rich media materials for all teachers for all state standards. With the support of the CK-12 Foundation, Virginia and California adopted open-source digital textbooks over the last year.
Smarter Filters
One enormous problem that is stifling innovation and doesn’t get much attention is the internet filters that schools use. While there is a clear need to have some control over where kids go on the internet, the current filters are blocking a huge amount of the Internet and create a significant barrier for teachers to do anything innovative with the web. I recently did a classroom observation at a low income public school in the Bay Area, and the teacher complained that he couldn’t even get to UC Berkeley’s site to get his materials from his Masters degree program. Also, when I used to work with students and told them that they are doing a video project that would be on YouTube, their enthusiasm and engagement jumped 10 fold. On the other hand, when I later explained that YouTube was blocked and we’d use a different lesser known site, they lost interest. Brand is very important to kids and can be a huge motivator. We need to invest in better filtering tools and figure out how we can leverage the digital spaces kids love inside the classroom. The evidence is clear that using the Internet can act as a powerful tool for engaging students, especially the ones that are most at risk of dropping out. We need better school policies on internet filtering that don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Common Core Standards
States adopting a common core of higher level standards will help provide some coherence to the education system across the country. This will stoke innovation in two ways: first, it will immediately and dramatically increase the market size for entrepreneurs in the field of K-12 education and in turn help them attract more investment. Today, someone starting a company in education has to develop and worry about 50 different states, each with their own standards. This fragmentation puts a significant cost and burden for small innovative startups. Second, unifying under some common standards will make it more likely that innovations in one state will transfer more easily to other states. This should also stoke more collaboration between states, which again will increase the transfer of innovations.
Seat time to Learning time
Today most states focus funding on time spent in school (average daily attendance). Shifting the focus from seat time to learning time could open up an entire new space for innovative, and perhaps more effective, learning environments. The state of California recently decreased its minimum annual school days requirement by five days to help accommodate the recent budget cuts. (In practice, most school districts are choosing to make other cuts rather than cutting school days, but they are now allowed to cut days.) This is a particularly troubling policy change given the strong evidence that time in school is directly correlated with academic success. But, by shifting the focus from seat time to learning time, districts in California could choose to have five self-learn days spaced throughout the year where students would spend the days learning outside the school or in a lab on online courses or digital media learning environments that have proven learning outcomes. This could help deal with the budget cuts while not losing out on critical learning time. One could also imagine that teachers could leverage digital resources in new ways that help reach the kids where they are and when they want it rather than in just a specific 45 minute period in the classroom.
Overall, there is a lot of innovation going on in education, but unfortunately very little of it is making its way into the public education system. I believe with a handful of tweaks and shifts in policy, we can open up and create pockets of space to allow the system to begin to absorb and integrate these innovations. At a recent meeting of the National Association of State Boards of Education I was pleasantly surprised with how forward thinking the group was and to see that policies are starting to shift in states to become more digital friendly. Let’s hope that this continues and begins to open up the system and allow a lot of the great work happening outside to have impact on the inside.
Games can be used for A LOT of purposes - well beyond entertainment. And as they are a young medium, they are not often envisioned beyond their current contexts; we are all still just getting used to them. Some people though have caught on early, and are using games in almost everything they do. Here's a list I excerpted from an email I received earlier this year outlining just some of the ways this one contractor/developer is using games: (Do read through it - it will surprise you.)
Core Values,Leadership, Lessons Learned, Communication,Ethics, Drug Abuse Prevention, Alcohol Abuse Prevention, Personnel Readiness,Teamwork, Coaching and Counseling,Time Delegation, Organizational Skills,Contingency Contracting,Personal Advancement, Suicide Prevention,PTSD, Psychological Health,Adaptability, Sexual Harassment,Ethical Leadership, Family Responsibility,Cross Cultural Communications, Reasoning Under Fire, Deployment Preparation,Equipment Readiness and Maintenance, Command and Control,Support Operations,Command Supply Discipline, Development of Junior Officers,Value and Limitations of Doctrine, Force Protection, Explosive Ordnance Disposal,Wounded Warrior Transition,Anti-terrorism, Surveillance Detection,
If you read through the end of the list, you will probably be able to guess who this developer is making games for - the military. So why is the military using games for so much of what they do? Because they can. Because they have the foresight - and the means - to use this incredible technology to address all sorts of challenges they face.
So why not us? Why don't we who work in the public interest sector - the educators, NGOs, philanthropists - use games this extensively? Some of the challenges we face are just as important as those of the military - Educating our children. Raising awareness about public health concerns. Addressing poverty - These all stack up quite robustly alongside protecting our country. Yet, we are WAY behind. The public interest sector is often the last to adopt new technologies. We need to understand and use these new tools as much as they do.
So what do we do about it?
First we need a more informed public discourse about the medium. Games are not the enemy; they are not the corrupting forces of evil they are painted in most mainstream (and congressional) portraits of them. Parents, the media and our representatives in Washington need to understand games in a much broader context. Games can and should be used for a wide variety of public interest causes.
We need public funds as well. We need a dedicated resource pool for expanding the uses of digital media to address and engage the public in the core issues facing our country: poverty, educational disparities, healthcare issues, lots more. Games for Change is calling on a number of thought leaders, including the Cooney Center, to join with us to think through what we need to harness the incredible power of games and digital media to address some of the core issues our country faces. If the military gets it, why shouldn't we?
We’re excited to participate in the CooneyCenter’s upcoming Forum. Families of all socio-economic classes are using technology in their daily lives. The NationalCenter for Family Literacy (NCFL) is on a quest to crack the code on helping families—particularly families struggling with low literacy skills—use technology to further education and their well-being. Parents and children must be equally adept at using technology if we are to realize its full potential for learning.
The opportunity to draw upon the nation’s brightest minds in education and technology to further these goals is one that can’t be missed. For us, it’s about exploring the rapid advancements possible to drive literacy-building activities into the hands and minds of children and families with lightening speed.
In the past, literacy was about reading and comprehending the written word. Reading a book and talking about it. Access to information in linear ways: libraries, newspapers and the like. Today literacy encompasses much more and children are exposed to information very quickly. We must find and deploy new advances quickly if we are to retain our competitive edge. And we must ensure parents are aligned to support these advancements in the home and with supervision to maximize the opportunity and provide a safe environment with technology.
A recent MIT study concluded that technology closes the gap between students’ individual skills and background differences. NCFL has capitalized on this potential by furthering approaches that capture the motivation of at-risk families to use technology to drive learning. If we can harness their interest in technology to achieve educational progress, amazing things can happen.
Working with the CooneyCenter, NCFL is embarking on a new frontier for families in this country. We look forward to the dialogue at the Forum and, even more, marveling at our progress of the past 20 years—just as many do today regarding the power of Sesame Street in using television to support education.
We are strong believers in investing in stronger communities, and we’re in the midst of one of our most exciting community investment initiatives ever. Building on our partnership with One Economy, we recently launched the Comcast Digital Connectors program, an innovative initiative that teaches young people digital literacy skills and how to use broadband technologies to benefit their communities.
As America evolves into a truly digital nation, we think we have a responsibility to help ensure that all citizens of all backgrounds can use broadband to achieve their full potential. Helping more Americans learn the benefits of broadband (“digital literacy”) and getting more Americans to use it (“broadband adoption”) will make our communities and our nation stronger.
The Comcast Digital Connectors program integrates all of our core community investment priorities in one great opportunity. It promotes community service, expands digital literacy, and builds tomorrow’s leaders in many of the diverse communities we serve.
By the end of 2010, the Comcast Digital Connectors program will operate in at least 22 cities across America. In communities like Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Morgantown, WV, Dearborn, MI and Hanford, CA, groups of young people – aged 14 to 21 – from diverse, low-income backgrounds will be trained in digital literacy in both after-school and summertime training programs. Participants will team up with other Digital Connectors two to three times per week at their local school, community center or affordable housing development to work on what they have learned. Additionally, Comcast Digital Connectors will volunteer their time at a variety of locations (schools, churches, senior centers, etc.) to help promote digital literacy more broadly in their communities. Comcast employees across the country will have the opportunity to interact with Comcast Digital Connectors by serving as mentors and lending their leadership and expertise to local programs. And Digital Connectors across the nation will become part of an online social network where they will share their experiences and learn from each other.
This new program will take One Economy’s original Digital Connectors program to the next level. To date, nearly 3,000 young people have participated in Digital Connectors programs and have contributed more than 56,000 hours of community service. The One Economy-Comcast partnership aims to double the number of young people engaged in the program and the hours of service they provide their communities.
Expanding digital literacy and promoting broadband adoption are two critical national goals. As President Obama has said, “Here in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online.” In partnership with One Economy, we hope to bring many thousands more Americans into the digital age.
Colleen Macklin, Parsons The New School for Design
In the recent Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams we get to see what a 23rd century Vulcan school was like for young Spock. Hundreds of crater-like pods, with 360-degree projection systems, allow individual students to navigate through an encyclopedic array of topics fully described through visualizations and sound. These images, as science fiction images often do, illuminate more about our present anxieties and desires than they do about possible futures. Star Trek fan and media theorist Henry Jenkins points out these conflicting visions in his blog, "Confessions of an Aca/Fan":
"In some ways, this is the future which many educators fear -- one where they have been displaced by the machine. In other ways, it is the future we hope for - one where there are no limits placed on the potentials of individual learners to advance."
As an interaction designer I can’t help but be fascinated by the design characteristics of these learning pods, particularly as a learning space and experience. Spatially, the pods enable a 360-degree view of virtual content, placing the student in the center of a whirl of information, visualized in formulas and images. Experientially, the intelligence (presumably artificial) that runs the displays also has a voice - quizzing the student on a wide array of subjects, from geometry to ethics. The effect is a high tech quiz or spelling bee, knowledge containable in a question and short answer. And in a reverse of the exploratory pleasures of the Internet, students merely provide the answers to questions asked by the computer – they don’t ask questions of their own. Perhaps we are glimpsing a Vulcan standardized test? While the delivery is individualized, as Jenkins points out, it’s also asocial, physically inactive (there’s no “learning by doing”), and if we take away the special effects, no more advanced than some of the drill-based learning methods we use today.
From the tricorder to the holodeck, Star Trek has, since its introduction in the 60s, had a tremendous influence on technology designers. Wah Ming Chang's communicator designs for the original TV series inspired Martin Cooper's mobile phone design research. Will the images of the 23rd century Vulcan school influence future school design? In terms of a spatial and experiential approach to learning, I actually think there are more interesting examples present now, in the 21st century. I’ll mention two of them, and why, from the perspective of interaction design, they promote not only cool new technologies and “special effects”, but also breakthroughs in the design of learning.
In SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab), a mixed-reality learning environment developed by ASU’s David Birchfield, students also inhabit a projected world where diverse subjects can switch as quickly as the speed of light. However, this is where the similarity between SMALLab and Star Trek’s vision ends. Instead of surrounding us at eye-level, the projections for SMALLab are on the floor. The fact that images are beneath you immediately activates the space. Like the lines chalked on the sidewalk forming a hopscotch court, SMALLab beckons for ACTION. We want to step, run, jump, and crawl on the interactive images beneath us. And the space also encourages this – it uses playful interaction to illuminate how systems work – from concrete poetry to physics. By using our bodies, SMALLab engages our minds in making sense of these systems. In addition, it is a social space. SMALLab has a multi-user interface promoting collaboration and team problem solving. Students learn by coordinating their actions, helping each other, and making sense of how the systems underlying knowledge about a subject actually behave and respond.
Like SMALLab, Mannahatta: The Game (M:TG), a prototype developed by PETLab at Parsons, takes students out of a typical learning environment – in this case, onto the streets of New York City. A collaboration with Dr. Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society, M:TG uses geographically tagged data about the ecosystems present on Manhattan island prior to colonization in 1609 to create a game of exploration and discovery. Currently available for the iPhone platform, the game requires that players traverse the city in order to uncover and link ecosystem elements, rebuilding the webs that once existed, city block by city block. Using the iPhone as a kind of detector, players are notified when a needed species (mountain lion, poplar tree) or eco-link (“food for”, “shelter for”) is available nearby. M:TG is a game, but it is also a platform for experimenting with how augmented reality and geo-spatial databases can be brought together to form a situated space for learning. In other words, M:TG takes learning out of the classroom and into the world.
These two examples are pilot environments and prototypes. They aren’t yet common, and the implications of these spaces are still being discovered. Both share the element of play, collaboration and creativity as a strategy for activating learning. These environments clearly diverge from current classroom norms – and they also go a step beyond their science fiction counterparts – by designing playful and rich spaces and experiences as integral to 21st century learning.
SMALLab is one of the two dozen innovations that will be showcased at the Technology Playground demo space at the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age Forum on October 28.
