If your parents are in the top quartile (wealth) in the US, there is an 80% chance you will go on to college. If your parents are in the bottom quartile, there’s an 8% chance.
But what if we found ways to change that? What if we found that a certain way of teaching could give kids born to the lowest quartile a 95% chance of graduating high school and an 87% chance to go on to college?
This is the record of KIPP, and as Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, told a group of us on May 22, it’s a record shared by some pockets of public schools and the best charter schools in the country. We had assembled because Westchester Community College offers a series of salons, where they bring the community into people’s homes to discuss literature, media, politics, sports, and arts with national figures.
How does KIPP achieve its results with at-risk students? Barth revealed that KIPP is predominantly middle schools, and the program features
Curriculum that includes both character and academics
High expectations for each child, that he or she will graduate and go on to college
Schools days lasting from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Homework practically every night
Individual support for any student struggling to learn
High degree of autonomy for each school
Training, coaching, and supervised teaching for new teachers
Variety of assessments of teaching used to inform ongoing teacher professional development
Compacts with parents that children will come to school every day with their homework completed
Other high performing schools outside of the KIPP system may have found other effective systems, but this is what has worked for KIPP. KIPP has 125 schools, reaching 40,000 students. KIPP’s growth goal is to double the number of students it serves, but that’s just a tiny fraction of the 55 million students in K12 across the US, or 31 million students in poverty (receiving free or reduced price lunch).
Barth asked the audience a question, “How many of the kids in this country woke up today and went to a school that gave them a shot to compete in today’s global economy?” After a pause, he answered, “1 in 11.”
He then pointed out, that while we would all like to change this immediately, no one knows how to do it; there is no magic pill. And even if someone did know what to do, we don’t have the systems or the resources to effectuate this type of change overnight. Barth proposed a more realistic goal: suppose we wanted to change this ratio to 1 in 3 students over the next ten years; wouldn’t that be remarkable progress and something more likely to be achieved?
Someone in the audience proposed that we look at the charter schools as education laboratories, learn what they do best and how they do it, and then figure out how to apply those lessons to public schools. She asked how KIPP was interacting with public schools.
Barth said that KIPP decided that they would focus their efforts and resources where they had enough control to ensure success. KIPP has conducted leadership academies, where principals or district administrators spend time in KIPP schools and learn KIPP methods, and these have had some success. In terms of KIPP directly working with public schools, the average superintendent lasts for only two years. If KIPP were to set up a program to mentor the public schools in a community, and new leadership came in, what are the chances that the program would continue? (I had the distinct impression that this was not a hypothetical situation, but that’s just a hunch.)
As with other charter schools, KIPP has two funding mechanisms. First, KIPP receives state and federal funds for each student, and those funds come from the same pool as public schools. Second, KIPP receives money from philanthropy, and has raised $195 Million since its founding in 1994. It’s clear that KIPP as an organization will not solve the educational problems of the country: they will not have the reach, their expenditure per student is not sustainable over 30 million students, and public schools do not have the flexibility to try some of their methods.
Yet, thousands of kids have been able to graduate high school and attend college because KIPP gave them the confidence, support, and tools.
Massachusetts is currently the number one state in student achievement in the US. But, if it were a country, it would be just 17th in the world. What does that say about the other 49 states?
Dunn noted that there has been a lot of noise about education reform, and there is a lot of stupid money coming into education, but these are not getting to the root of the problem. Our goals should be to help teachers teach and students learn, not to reduce costs or make backpacks lighter. Dunn went on to comment that inadequate professional development around education technology has been the biggest impediment to change, and that our focus is often distracted.
In the second day’s keynote, Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna described how Idaho is transforming education with the recent passage of the Students Come First laws. He observed that it’s not just one thing, reform has to be comprehensive involving compensation and tenure, managing technology, changing teaching paradigms, giving parents greater voice and choice, and putting the children first.
The first hurdle was pushing the reforms through the legislature. When the education and political leadership looked at all the changes they felt needed to be done, they concluded that they would face just as much opposition if they tried to do part of the reforms or all of them, so they did not compromise on the breadth of the reforms they pushed through the legislature. In fact, they faced so much opposition that they received personal threats along with having their tires slashed. There was so much pressure that any time the legislators went home for the weekend, Luna knew that he would need to recount votes and re-innoculate the swing legislators.
The legislation passed. Tenure has been replaced with a different due-process system for new teachers. Teacher compensation has been raised, and is dependent on a combination of student test scores, parent evaluations, and school administration evaluations. Parents have more choices, students can opt to take individual courses from different schools or providers. All students need to take at least two online HS courses to graduate. And technology and PD are built into school financing so they can’t be singled out for reductions when budgets get tight.
Luna says it’s now up to them to implement. We can’t hide behind excuses that other countries don’t have our diversity or poverty. They may not have our exact problems, but all the countries ahead of us have their own hurdles to overcome, and they have made a commitment to educate all their children. Luna’s goal is not just for Idaho to become first in the US, it’s for Idaho’s students to become global leaders in student achievement and employability.
Since teachers are the number one factor in schools driving student performance, the ability to develop and keep good teachers is going to be critical to Idaho’s success. One small indication of success is that since passage of Students Come First, the number of teachers who have left Idaho to teach in other states has decreased by half.
With a general election coming up this November, Luna is hopeful that interim results will convince voters to stay the course.
In a panel of effectively communicating the power of education technology, Matt Cohen, Tom Whitby, and Frank Catalano pointed out that because there is so little education reporting in the general press, bad reporting gets magnified and distorts what is actually happening. Reporters don’t go into schools and they don’t talk to teachers; they talk with vendors, government officials, and politicians. As a result, persistent myths that get passed on as facts damage efforts to improve schools.
In addition to poor reporting, the trio noted three obstacles to improving teacher and student effectiveness. First, there have been so many different education reforms, many teachers feel that if they just ignore any attempt to change the way they teach, it will eventually go away. Second, if you take bad practice in the classroom and make it digital, it’s still bad practice. Effective change is effectuated through superior leadership that can overcome these and other obstacles. Third, the only tech professional development that most teachers get is one to two days at the beginning of the school year; that’s not enough to modify behavior or impart competence. Technology has to be made part of every teacher’s workday for it to hold up to its promise.
Bob Resnick of Education Market Research showed the growth of K12 education purchases has been increasing by 4.2% per year since 2004, to $18.3 Billion, despite education cutbacks. Comparing 2010 to 2009, digital products were up 17.9%, while the total market increased by about 4%. His data shows that student enrollment is likely to increase at the same time per pupil expenditures are increasing. The fastest growing segments (2010 over 2009 sales) are
Reading and Math interventions (50% increase in sales)
While sales of some traditional materials are decreasing:
Library books and services (17% decrease in sales)
Teacher resource materiuals (13% decrease in sales)
Guided leveled readers (10% decrease in sales
Resnick’s survey indicates the growth of interactive white boards, with an installed base in 2010 of 1.5 million units, or an average of 20 IWBs per school. Most teachers say that that they primarily use IWB resources that come “from their own imagination and ingenuity.” Resnick commented that the next wave of content development will be for IWB use and for 1 to 1 classrooms.
Resnick’s data points out the shift from print to digital occurring at all levels of education. Cengage’s Dunn, Idaho’s Luna, and panelists Whitby, Cohen, and Catalano demonstrated the complexity of education issues and the need to focus on student learning as the end result. Luna’s statewide initiative in education reform shows how difficult it can be to effectuate systemic change, and is an interesting experiment in top-down education reform. (Of course, that’s easy for me to say, I’m in NY, and it’s not my salary being affected.) Maybe, ten years from now, we will no longer start education conferences by pronouncing that the US education system is a national disgrace.
Sitting still at a desk while someone in the front of the room lectures
Preparing for standardized tests
Changing what you are doing every 50 minutes, no matter whether you’d actually finished in 10 minutes or whether you needed more time
Writing five-paragraph essays incorporating highly scored words such as “paradoxically”, “nonplussed”, and “notwithstanding” while filling nearly all the allocated space
Answering even numbered questions (because those are the ones that don’t have the answers printed in the back of the book)
Focusing time and effort solely on activities that will be graded, along with the related skill of sticking to a rubric when completing assignments, and being careful not to go beyond the rubric
Eschewing tools, technologies, and resources that could reduce time and effort or improve the end result because that would be cheating
Forming learning and work groups only with others of the same age, because age is the most important attribute for what a person can and should do
Knowing and accepting your place, because your teacher’s and society’s evaluation of your worth as a person is reflected in your grades and test scores
Avoiding the things you like to do, but doing what you are told, because learning and work shouldn’t be fun
Sloan’s Blended Learning Conference was held April 23-4, 2012 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is primarily a postsecondary conference, although there were a few sessions on K12 blended learning implementation. K12 often follows where higher education leads, so if you are primarily interested in K12 education, this might be a glimpse into your future as well.
Blended learning is expanding, in types as well as numbers. The face to face component might occur incidentally once or twice, or might meet as often as twice a week. The drivers for expansion are both monetary and pedagogical, although, as you’ll see below, there are certainly obstacles and wrong turns in its implementation. We think it’s important to note that this conference dealt with Higher Ed as it functions today, and did not provide a glimpse of future changes we might see there. Perhaps that will be more apparent at the Innovations Conference Sloan runs in the summer.
Cost drivers for blended learning
To the extent that money drives educational decisions, blended learning may be the most viable solution to two problems.
There seems to be a growing national shortage of classroom space, and no money to build more. Institutions are thus pressuring instructors to reduce seat time requirements for their course. In fact, the original definition of blended learning stated that 30 to 70% of class time be replaced by online activities.
There are only two ways to substantially adapt to the huge cuts in state spending for higher education: raise tuition (the prime reason tuition rates have increased dramatically over the last 10 years), or increase efficiencies (larger classes, more classes per instructor, use of more adjunct faculty). Blended learning is looked on as a way to allow an instructor to teach larger classes and also potentially reach a larger audience, since there is a lower requirement to be in the same classroom. Changes in financial aid have also made it possible to spend less “seat” time to accomplish learning.
Improved pedagogy for blended learning
While these economic factors are probably driving the institutions to expand blended learning, there is a potential for more effective teaching as well. In fact, many students seem to prefer blended to online or face to face classes, and some studies indicate greater effectiveness of blended over either of the other two methods. After all, how engaged is a student in the back row of a 400 person class listening to a lecture?
Some of the enhancements that are now available include:
Heterogeneous groups: Greater diversity often results in greater learning. One example is small groups consisting of students from different campuses who are taking the same course and who then work together in project or problem based learning. Students can form, or be placed in, asynchronous study groups as well, jointly taking notes on readings and lectures or commenting on each other’s’ summaries. (A session on long-term group project management proved most informative and is described later.)
Peer review: giving students the ability to see and then review (using some rubric) the works of other students increases their awareness of good work while also potentially reducing the workload of the instructor. Peer evaluation, which is related, also emulates the real-world work environment and has proven valuable.
Gamification: converting reading, research, or assessment assignments into game-like activities can increase student engagement. For example, a research project can be made into a treasure hunt, or quizzes can be converted into games. This design change really enhances elements of interactivity beyond what’s accomplished in traditional instruction.
Flexibility and time shifting: In addition to making class lectures available online, tests can be scheduled not at a particular moment, but at the point the individual students feels competent.
Assessment: Some schools are experimenting with letting students retake tests until they are satisfied with the results, converting assessments of learning into assessment as learning. Testing can also emulate real world work scenarios by allowing resources to be used in test taking environments, testing not only what the student knows, but how well they can solve problems using the right tools.
The general practice for creating blended courses is for the individual instructors to determine how to incorporate online resources and tools into their classes: which resources to use and how much seat time to reduce. Schools support the instructors through training, use of graduate students for design and development, and school guidelines for look and feel. Experienced companies such as Erudient (Erudient is a client of ours) are available to assist with design, development, support, and resource selection.
Hurdles and some solutions for blended learning
The end goal of education is still to increase student knowledge, skill, and expertise. Some clumsy attempts at blended learning are to put PowerPoint slides online along with some narration, reduce face to face by one class a week, and call the course “blended”. This conference was to dispense with those types of efforts, and many sessions at the conference dealt with some of the problems in implementation blended classes and the ways that the speaker used in overcoming them.
One problem is students who sign up for hybrid or online classes, and then are not prepared for the differences between instructor directed classes and the self-motivation and organization required online. One suggestion was to have successful students make videos of how they successfully completed the course to be shown at the beginning of courses. Other instructors pointed out the importance of early warning systems to monitor when students start falling behind and then immediate engagement with those students.
For group work, many pointed out that you can’t just assign remote students into a group and then expect them to productively accomplish something. Students need time to form, which can be provided by icebreaking or get-acquainted activities. One school requires groups to record their online interactions so that, if there are disagreements among group members about certain participants not contributing, the school can monitor what actually happened.
Similarly, some faculty are used to traditional settings and haven’t managed the nuanced differences such as building the community of learners, structuring activities and projects in a way to help students manage the time to complete long term projects. One particular session covered techniques to help students by building team activities including peer evaluations and assigning a grade to completing a task. Milestones ensured that students move through the activity without creating bottlenecks or problems for one another. Peer evaluation on the various iterations of the project ensure that by the time the end is reached, the final output is already in good shape. While this technique is used in writing all the time, a group activity in a blended scenario requires real project management planning and skills.
One interesting use of blended learning in K12 is the WCATY (Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth) Academy, which is a middle school. This group serves about a third of the districts in the state, with about 1300 students a year. Their goal is to make students responsible for their own learning and understand their own learning processed by digging deeply into one topic. For example, a course on the French Revolution is called “Off with their Heads” and starts with a virtual tour of the Versailles palace. A course on meeting up with aliens actually teaches communications techniques. WCATY teachers focus on learning, and assessing learning, through storytelling, with a combination of virtual and face to face activities for students.
Another session was presented on blended learning in a studio course, and the research showed clearly that while the activity was accomplished by individual students, group evaluations and expert feedback were critical to the final result and greatly enhanced the learning of both the students evaluated and the students evaluating. To learn more and to see the research, including some of the best use of graphics in a research paper, contact Mahmoud Reza Saghafi at saghafi@student.qut.edu.au, (Queensland University of Technology.)
One of the financial goals for institutions to implement blended learning is to increase class size, which can cause a cascade of issues. Aisha Jackson, Amanda McAndrew, Jackie Moriyama, and Viktoriya Oliynyk of the University of Colorado at Boulder maintain a website of mostly free tools to help with these large classes, and which can also help with face to face large classes: http://bit.ly/largecourseinfo
In conclusion
Blended Learning can be a magic button; reducing the costs of education while also enhancing learning. There are many resistors and still some hurdles to overcome to successful implementation, but, as one participant pointed out, if the lecture format for classes were introduced as a new technology today, it would like be universally panned.
This conference would not have been possible without the energy and organization of Tanya Joosten and the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We would like to put a plug in for Dr. Joosten’s book Social Media for Educators as a big thank you for your successful efforts.
The headquarters of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) in Versailles, Kentucky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a summary of an interview I conducted with Dr. Jay Box and Dr. Sandy Cook of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Dr. Box and Dr. Cook helped create and run one of the leading online higher education programs in the US.
Your statewide system is a pioneer in statewide online higher education. Could you just give us a short history behind it?
In the spring of 2006, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System decided to investigate if there was a different way to deliver online education, primarily to attract new audiences to the colleges. The system was having success with its traditional, semester-based, KCTCS Online: Learn By Term offering, but we were missing an audience.
The result of the study was we proposed developing a new online program delivery system, eventually labeled KCTCS Online: Learn on Demand, in the summer of 2007. It took a few months to select the programs of study, and we focused on general education courses (Writing, Communications, Languages, Math Science, History) which are the foundational courses for all associate and bachelors level degrees, and two technical associate degree programs (business administration and information technology). Originally about 60 semester credit hours of courses were identified for development.
We put an RFP out to the different campuses in our system based on a template we developed. We’d hoped to begin delivery in the Fall of 2008, but a longer-than-expected development phase forced a delay in our delivery timeline. We piloted the first programs in Spring 2009, going fully live in Summer 2009.
We now have about 75 courses, including 20 general education courses and labs. You can get an Associate in Science or an Associate in Art degree, for example. We also have built out three technical programs: business administration, information technology, and nursing; plus we are now offering College Readiness Writing, Math, and Reading (developmental education modules).
Our courses are modular; modules lasting three to five weeks. With certain exceptions, students can start any time, and completion is competency based, so they are not restricted to the traditional semester start dates or full semester courses. When students demonstrate competence in a module, they can then take the next one until they complete all the modules for a particular course.
How do you choose a program that you intend to put online?
We primarily look at the types of programs that lead to graduates that are needed in the workforce in Kentucky. For example, we knew that nursing was needed, so we spent time developing our online nursing program. Programs like that take more time because you have to build in clinical experience and licensure.
We also knew that there was a demand for effective college readiness or developmental courses.
This summer we intend to start rolling out a program in integrated engineering technology for industrial maintenance. We are working with other states and manufacturing companies in designing and creating the curriculum.
What is driven by the individual campuses and what by the centralized administration?
The initial RFPs were based on statewide research to support business and industry. As we move to the next phase, individual colleges are submitting proposals based on the needs in their areas.
How have the results been in terms of reducing costs or increasing the number of students served by the total system?
Enrollments have increased dramatically. This spring 2012 enrollment is triple that of last spring. We feel we have met a need for students who need to begin other than when traditional semesters begin, who can’t necessarily make a class at a certain time, and who might not be able to complete an entire semester course but could complete a module.
Our student satisfaction surveys show that individuals increasingly like the shorter courses. The can see their way to completing a five week course. Other students prefer the longer period of time, so we offer most of our courses in both a modular and full course format.
Students can start any day of the week in their classes, so this created a need to expand student services. A student might need to be able to talk to someone at any time on any day, so we needed to address 24 x 7 x 365 services. We’ve found that we could both expand our services and save money by contracting this out; we provide a consistent support for all students in all courses throughout the state.
What types of materials are typically developed for a course?
We partner with the publishers and other digital content providers.
We want to provide highly interactive and engaging content. Also, because our courses are modular and start-anytime, the content had to be there every day. The publishers had to break down their digital assets to align with KCTCS course competencies and keep their content available in the Learning Management System (LMS) at all times.
We’ve found Pearson and Cengage in particular have given our instructional design people particularly good content.
One example of systematic course design is in college readiness. We wanted to provide an environment where students could progress at an accelerated rate. A College Readiness Virtual Advisor helps students get ready for diagnostics. We identify what students know and give them credit for what they already know, and then only enroll them in what they don’t know. We’re seeing some good success with students getting ready to do college-level work.
What is the process for proposing, designing, creating, and then running an online course?
We have a central support group for instructional design and reviewing all modules.
In the first few years we had grant money to seed development. Those first courses have now paid back the development costs, and we are reinvesting those funds for new courses, so development is a sustainable operation.
Our course builders do not have to build content. They work with the publishers and other sources. In other words they primarily have to find it and then align it in a competency based fashion. Our rule of thumb is that it costs roughly $2,000 per credit hour to develop a course.
What differences in student outcomes do you observe in online, hybrid, and face to face courses?
Online students do pretty much the same as the other delivery methods. With Learn on Demand, we had an 85% completion rate of the modules last Fall, this is our target and it was the first time we hit the target.
The withdrawal rate is higher for online students. Probably the two major reasons for withdrawals are the students may not be ready for an online learning environment and its rigor, and that sometimes life just happens. We are constantly tweaking the courses to continuously improve, and we have spent more time preparing students for an online learning environment through development of a student support orientation course.
Also we use an early warning system to see if students are not keeping up with their work so we can offer support, hopefully before the student gets too far behind or it is too late. We’ve found that it’s important to get the students engaged early, so we have challenged our facilitators and lead instructors to be proactive with students and engage right away.
Are there any types of courses that you think lend themselves more to one teaching mode or another?
With the right instructor and the right team of course leaders putting the content together, we’ve been able to put courses of all types online with success.
With lab based programs, such as nursing, we may have to start students in cohorts to be able to address scheduling labs, because sometimes we will have to schedule labs in different parts of the states.
We don’t have many “dirty hands” type of technical programs online because of their heavy lab requirement.
There has been a great deal of news about massive online courses, what are your thoughts about these?
We have been following this quite a bit. I don’t see it being a market for us at this point of time, though.
This is a wonderful development, but it doesn’t fit our mission or our charter. We are primarily community based, and because we are a state system, we work as a state partnership to meet the needs of our state. We do have some students outside of Kentucky, but that’s not our focus.
We deliver education that is foundational; the first two years of a bachelors program, or programs that allow people to join the workforce in a year or two.
Many of the large online courses are to share and promote the expertise of a particular faculty member.
We are keeping an eye on badging initiatives, looking to see how they might fit in.
How do you see the role of the university, or especially cc and tc changing over the next 5 years?
We spend a lot of time discussing this.
Community Colleges have been evolving, and continue to evolve, over many decades from what used to be called Junior Colleges or Vocational Schools to very comprehensive institutions meeting the needs of all people.
But with cuts in federal and state funding for Higher Education, resulting in students paying more of their own way, we have to look at what we can afford to continue to offer. We may have to eliminate programs that are no longer in high demand or do not provide high earnings for graduates.
We are putting our efforts into programs for students who can move on to four year colleges and on programs to help students get jobs in high demand tech areas.
We have to use technology. There is no doubt that adding more staff is not going to be feasible, so we have to find ways to help our current staff be more efficient. We have to help our students use technology so that they can take control over their own learning and be prepared for the workplace which is so infused with technology.
From a delivery side, we have to think toward mobile; come up with delivery methods that move toward mobile and prepare our faculty to teach in that environment.
I do believe that where we are heading in is more partnerships, partnerships with other institutions, with publishers, LMS companies, and potential employers. Education is too important think that one school in one state has the magic bullet. We need to tap into all these other organization to develop the resources that are going to work for all of us.
We face a huge challenge as a nation. Technology will play a huge role. Our challenge is to prepare both our faculty and our students to use technology to raise their level of competency so we can provide industry and society with graduate that have the skill sets they need.
In Atlanta, TX, over 60% of African American households earn less than $20,000 a year.
Children grow up hoping that somehow, a college scholarship and then a professional sports contract will be their way out of poverty. Yet, in the history of the NFL, there are only 6 players hailing from Atlanta.
Map of Cass County Texas highlighting Atlanta (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If you don’t make it into sports, perhaps you can get a $10 an hour job at the pulp plant. Third prize is minimum wage at one of the retail stores in town. Meth addiction is not a rare occurrence. Sixty percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch at school.
With these prospects in front of them, what is the relevance of school?
And yet, the district is seeing a glimmer of hope in an unofficial program being run on entrepreneurship.
The program started two months ago. Kevin Honeycutt invited a few students to come to a classroom after school. He asked them what excited them, what were they good at. He introduced them, via Skype, to a couple of 20 year olds who had successfully created products and sold them.
This month Kevin and Ginger Lewman issued the same after-school invitation, but 15 people showed up the first day, and about twenty five the second. They all talked about the things they would love to do for a living, what made them unique. For many it was art or crafts, for some it was music, others had different passions.
Then Kevin and Ginger presented the students with a contract they should make with themselves:
Dear me,
I will pour my heart and soul into the effort of launching my business and my brand.
I will believe in myself even when nobody else does.
I will work while others rest.
I will learn anything and everything I need to to succeed.
I will represent myself professionally online and on social networks.
I will persist and succeed.
I will seek out people who know how to help me and be worthy of their help.
I will work on my business every day.
Because if I don’t do this, absolutely nothing will happen. My life won’t change, and my dreams will never come true.
The students got it. This wasn’t a school assignment. They weren’t being held to some standard by some teacher. If they wanted to change their lives, they had to change their lives. And if they didn’t, nothing would change.
Students were asked to gather materials about whatever it is they wanted to sell or build a business around. They were asked to start answering some tough questions in writing:
What pushes your passion?
Why do you love this work?
Who inspired you, and what did that inspiration mean?
Who supports you, and is always there?
What is your vision for 10 years or even 6 months from now, and what will your success look like then?
What will this work support?
For some of the students, this was the first assignment they had completed in school this entire year. They started seeing a different future.
Over the next two months, students are being asked to set up profiles on a student entrepreneurial website, and work out plans about how they are going to market their products and services.
It’s early, and it’s only a universe of about 25 students.
But let’s hope the Atlanta, TX school district, Kevin, and Ginger have found something to ignite hope and passion where there had only been resignation and despair.
Approximately 21 percent of US school-age children speak a non-English language at home, and this has grown from 10 percent in 1980. And, under No Child Left Behind, the 5.5+ million ELLs in US schools must meet the same achievment standards as their native English-speaking peers. These two factors are having an enormous impact on schools; schools need to adapt to the specific needs of this segment of students.
The Course Crafters Guide to the ELL Market: ELL Market Update and Analysis 2011-2012 reports that 80% of these ELLs are Hispanic. Not only are they not meeting academic proficiency, but the achievement gap is widening. Most classroom teachers and most classroom curricula have not been prepared for these diverse classes:
Schools need to cope with differences in background knowledge and previous literary experiences. They can’t assume that every student has read Dr. Seuss, or even that all students watch the same television shows or movies.
Schools need to supplement and scaffold daily and academic vocabulary. Without explicit support in vocabulary, ELLs struggle to understand texts; even when they show fluency in reading, they may have little actual comprehension of what they are reading.
Schools need to ensure students have reading and writing strategies. Many ELLs rely on word-by-word processing without the meta-cognitive strategies like making inferences.
Schools need to supply extra resources for math instruction. While it may seem logical that ELL students should not struggle more with math than other students, they often struggle to understand math problems, and lack the academic vocabulary and understanding of math syntax to learn concepts.
Schools may need to provide extra science instruction and support. In addition to often lacking the language skills to master science curricula, ELLs may not have the background knowledge or reading comprehension skills to learn scientific concepts the way teachers are accustomed to providing it.
Schools need to accommodate different cultural and language backgrounds in teaching history and social studies. These backgrounds have the potential to provide a richer experience for everyone in the classroom, but, if not acknowledged, also have the potential to stifle the learning of ELLs. Additionally, ELLs may not have the language skills to voluntarily actively participate in the discussions that are often the basis for learning social studies and history.
The full 200 page report, which contains suggestions for solving these issues, is available for $1,500 here. (Sorry, I originally had the wrong link and the wrong price.)
Technology Use in the Classroom
Simba Information recently released their K-12 Technology Tools & Trends 2012. It shouldn’t be surprising that the factors driving technology use in the classroom are
Pedagogical benefits of technology, often championed by individual teachers or technology coordinators
The promise of time and cost savings
Policy dictates from the federal and state level
Leadership in districts where technology is being used successfully
The report published an interesting chart on the number of hours per school day that different technologies are used.
(click image to enlarge)
Note that the spikes for Interactive whiteboards, Projectors, Desktop computers, and Laptop/netbook computers are at 5.1+ hours per day usage, while those for Tablets, Ereaders, MP3 players, and Smartphones are at NA or Don’t know. With greater adoption of tablets this year and next, it will be interesting to see if this changes.
The full K-12 Technology Tools & Trends report is available for $1,950 here.
This is an interview with Kim Curry the District Technology Director and Integration Specialist for the Mount Ayr School District in Western Iowa. It is the fourth largest district in Iowa geographically. It is a rural district with 650 students, and about a third are on free or reduced lunch.
Can you give a little background about yourself?
I am the District tech director and integration specialist, and I have been with the district for a little over a year. Any technology decision for the district goes through me, and I also build the tech professional development, co-teach with teachers to model technology integration, work 1 to 1 with teachers, bring in guest speakers, and I also support the hardware.
The tech director before me was primarily a hardware support person. When that person was leaving, the district met with our local AEA rep (AEAs are the Education Services Agencies in Iowa), and they determined that, while they could outsource the hardware support, what they really needed was someone to help integrate the technology into the classroom and curriculum, and they hired me because of my teaching and technical background.
Can you describe the 1-1 initiative in the Mount Ayr School District?
We’ve had a 1-1 initiative in 7th and 8th grades for about eight years. Then, the students would have to surrender their laptops and go back to traditional classrooms in high school. Next year we are going to expand the 1-1 program into the high schools.
Up until last year, there was no support or PD for the teachers on using the computers, and the teachers really just used the laptops as note taking devices for the students. We have Atomic Learning tutorials supplied by our AEA, but it is underutilized. The teachers have been so busy that they just haven’t explored it. One of my goals is to make it more of a resource for our teachers so they can help themselves.
Can you discern a difference between what kids learn in a traditional classroom versus what they are learning now in a class that utilizes the computers?
I was a classroom teacher for three years. In a traditional classroom, students do not get the level of project based learning they need so that they can start inquiring about things themselves. They are reliant on teachers to hold their hands; they are not as self-sufficient.
Now, they come out of the two years and the feel like they are more ready for college; they are better able to take charge of their own learning. They also come out learning to use quite a bit of software.
When the learning is student centered, they learn so much more.
What types of things do they learn that aren’t covered by the standardized tests?
They are learning at the top level of Bloom’s taxonomy because they are creating. And that also gives the teachers a greater sense of accomplishment.
The students create movies, they make websites, because when they have computers all that is easier to do. They learn how to create and put out what they want to say in different fashions depending on what they want to communicate and what audience they want to communicate to.
We are seeing better engagement and at a higher level. Students are more interested in the content because they are interacting with it in the course management system. They are not held back by slow or sloppy handwriting.
And how are their achievement reflected on the standardized tests?
It’s hard to say; we know we are seeing a lot of improvement in the non-standardized tests.
This was the first year that the teachers were trained, and they used to use the laptops more for students taking notes rather than for creation and eportfolios. Professional development for the teachers is key. Now that they are getting supported, we are starting to see the results. If the teachers had been helped in the long run, we’d be far ahead by now.
We know that behavioral issues are going down. And we did see a little rise in our middle school scores, specifically in science, this year. As we get more data in future years, it’s an area we will track.
What applications do you most recommend?
We are a Google Apps district. We have almost 100% use of Google docs. It’s great because it’s web based; students can connect to it from anywhere, on any platform, and they can collaborate and work in groups on projects. This is a free resource, and no one was really using it before I got here.
We use edmodo for an LMS. We are starting to use iMovie more and starting to use dropbox for storage and file sharing. We use Google Maps and Google Earth a lot.
What types of lessons use Google Maps and Google Earth?
One is Lit stories: “Let’s see where the characters are going in this book.” Students create and share maps. We use Google Maps because it is web-based, it allows students to collaborate on a project, and you can put a placemark and a picture on the map. Google Earth is a standalone program, but you can embed other media like audio. So if you wanted to do a field trip in Social Studies, the student could place a picture on the map of what the place looked like at the time a certain event happened, and then the student could use their voice and describe it. Then another student could go to that place and learn about it.
There is one Physical Science class that were plotting the results of soil and paint samples. Kids were able to plot out our county area to figure out which areas had higher levels of nutrients and contaminants in the soil. This project had been done in previous years with pins on a paper map, and the students liked this much better and were much more engaged with the data and project.
the teachers can model 3D images. A teacher can show how to take a square and pull it into a cube, for example.
One student used Google Sketchup to create a model of the water cycle.
One High School project was to have groups of kids design their future ideal school district. The kids learned Sketchup themselves. They learned the importance of keeping things to scale, which added a math component to the English classroom. They realized how complex it was to make a campus; they had to make sure they had all the components of an actual district, then write a paper describing the district, and speak about their design. They did research into what other districts have; most of these students have never been outside of the county and this gave them a chance to learn about other parts of the country. They learned to compare what they have with what they want, they learned to contrast their ideal district with other districts and our district.
During this project students learned research skills, planning, project management, collaboration skills, writing skills, and presentation skills. Kids put a lot more effort in this year than they did when the project only involved putting their ideal district on a poster paper.
Students have used Sketchup to work on floor plans for homes. For students interested in design, they’ve put together what they would desire in a house, while incorporating math skills into design.
What do students get from these types of activities that they would not get using a textbook in a traditional classroom?
It’s more hands-on. This is more like the types of things they will be doing when they get out in the real world and use computers for work. It allows the teachers to do more of what the kids want to do, and because the kids are much more engaged, they are willing to put more effort and time in, and they will remember more.
They have an electronic copy of what they did, and they can go back to it as well. This also makes it easier to involve the parents. We are a low income school district. We’re just starting to get the parents more involved. Because the kids can go home and show their parents what they are doing in class, the parents don’t have to wait for parent-teacher night, and they can actually help their children with their homework.
Do you have any closing thoughts on 1-1 initiatives or on integrating tech into the classroom?
Everything needs to be done with a purpose. We put out computers and IWBs into classrooms, but didn’t think through how they were going to be used to improve learning. We need to keep the students’ needs in the front of our minds. If we’re not doing things that will help the students, why are we introducing technology at all?
Students also have to be advocates of what they want. When we proposed extending 1-1’s into the high school, many of the students objected. This was because of their negative experiences with computers in Middle School, where the computers were primarily being used for note taking. When the district leadership stepped in and asked the students what they wanted to use computers for and how they wanted to learn, and then incorporated their suggestions into the technology plan, the students became more excited and backed the initiative.
Professional development and ongoing instructional support is key. Using technology in the classroom, whether it is computers or whiteboards, requires changes in teacher behavior, and that doesn’t happen just be sticking more devices into the classroom.
If a district is considering implementing or expanding technology, they should visit other districts that have done it successfully. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel, find out what is working and model it.
The following article is by Farimah Schuerman, managing partner of Academic Business Advisors. Farimah's strength has always been in helping educators and edtech companies understand the big picture.
We’re seeing a convergence of activity and trends that, when combined, will really accelerate technology implementation.
Afghan students learning English. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The first is around Common Core, and by extension, assessments that are the natural outgrowth of the new standards. At the recent CoSN/ SIIA Feedback Forum the CTOs of districts large and small were bemoaning the need to convert computers, which are normally used for instruction, into testing devices. Between the collection of the machines, sanitizing them, and the time in actually administrating exams, they felt a lot of teaching time would be lost. The common thinking was that these assessments would be internet based, (though issues about security were far from resolved.) Another expectation was that a single type of device would be required to ensure a common testing experience. In order to meet the requirements, CTOs are trying to figure out how to afford enough machines to accomplish the testing without jeopardizing instruction. Certainly, over the next couple of years we’ll see lots of alternative devices and methods for assessment evolve, but the financial challenge and the dual and competing needs will create a tension that’s unlikely to be easily addressed.
The second trend is the “Flipped Classroom.” Educators are clamoring to learn strategies and techniques that capitalize on student-centered learning, and on a recent SIIA committee call we learned that a recent webinar on the subject had over 1000 registrations. Truly impressive. With the proliferation of both free and paid web resources that students can access at home, and many software providers with Cloud-based applications that allow home access, anytime, anywhere learning is a reality. Teachers with ever-increasing class sizes can focus their energies on mentoring learning and helping students with specific challenges and students can move at their own pace. More and more applications will run and a multitude of devices and students can find resources for their own devices.
The third ties into both of the others, and that is “BYOD.” Districts are sharing their policies, methodologies and philosophies on how to implement policies that allow student to use their own devices, and using limited funds to lend equipment to students who don’t have home access instead
of waiting to see if they ever get enough resources to supply all s
tudents with laptops or tablets. Internet providers are offering low-cost services for education, so that access is more accessible. This trend has been picking up a lot of steam over the past year in particular. You’ll find lots of webinars and discussions on this topic.
Comfortable Seating, Learning Resource Centre, Edge Hill University (Photo credit: jisc_infonet)
The challenge we’re going to face is getting teaching staff, including administrators, comfortable with these trends that are driving the market. Whether you’re using tablets or laptops, or even cell phones, (even whiteboards, but that’s another topic) leveraging the available technologies to enhance or accelerate the learning activity will be key to having success. Luckily, there are companies and associations offering help in getting educators up to speed. The naturally social nature of the education community has spawned a number of very active social communities of learning that lend further support.
The combined impact of these trends are sure to have a snowballing effect on what schools and teachers can achieve with their students, and the impact of one-to-one device is going to have a real effect on educational activities, lessons, curriculum, and procedures.
