By Third Grade…. Is that what matters?

Posted on February 15, 2013 by TJK

Yesterday NPR discussed President Obama’s proposal for universal early childhood education. A popular argument for universal early childhood education cited by Gene Sperling, an economist who I really admire–as much as one can admire an economist–is that spending on early childhood education save taxpayer dollars down the road. Sperling sites research suggesting that every dollar spent on high-qulaity pre-kindergarten education saves between $4 and $17 down the road in terms of things like higher wages and decreased juvenile delinquency. Nice, right?

This morning, continuing their look at the President’s proposal, the station showcased Georgia’s early adoption of universal early childhood education legislation. Critics of the policy point to the added cost and evidence that by third grade the gains seen due to early childhood education basically even out. In other words kids who went to pre-k are performing at the same levels as those who didn’t.

Aside from the point that the evidence is arguable on that last point, I think both commentaries point to a common but pretty disturbing perspective: That the value of the child can be measured–should be measured–in future achievement. Essentially we are saying, it doesn’t matter so much what high-quality early childhood experience means to a child, unless it translates into higher test scores, higher wages, or increased employability later. We value the child on for his or her future potential, not for the inherent value of that child as a person. I find that to be one of the saddest comments on our educational system and our society as a whole.

Adult Education

Posted on March 14, 2012 by TJK

Here’s a great quote from Saul Griffith in a past issue of MAKE magazine… “Kids can smell didactic like a giant adult skunk.”

I was thinking about this the other day as I was talking with my wife about how even “creative teaching” can become burdensome when it’s rote. I remember coming home from school in the third grade, excited about a brand new investigation we were about to start in class, only to have my older sister say that she could tell me everything I’d need to know (and do) because she’d done it just two years earlier with the same teacher.

Of course, teachers–like writers, accountants, doctors, cooks, and just about everyone else–recycle successful work from the past. And of course, we hope that the work grows and changes based on our own experience, the individual interests and learning styles of our students and the dynamics of the classroom. But like everyone else, teachers get overwhelmed and tired. We can easily be drawn to reach into that same bag of tricks over and over. Even the most creative lesson or project (the first time) becomes didactic when we think we know exactly how it’s supposed to go, and what the end result will be. In fact, I bet if you took a video of these types of projects from year to year, you’d see not only the teacher, but the students become less and less engaged.

As adults we know that we do have a responsibility to teach our children well. But it’s like the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song: our children will also teach us. We’re too often trapped by the triple threat of adulthood: 1- We have a responsibility to care for and protect our children; 2- We don’t want to look like we don’t know what we’re talking about; and 3- We think we’re too old to learn anything new.

So, how do we avoid this trifecta of stink? I think the solution is simple, yet somewhat uncomfortable and hard to do within the context of traditional (or even untraditional) learning environments. We have to tackle questions and experiments with our students to which we do not already know the answers. We have to be willing to be wrong and to understand that rather than making us look stupid in front of our charges, it provides us with an opportunity to model the type of learning we’re trying to encourage. We also have to be willing to listen to students’ ideas and thoughts, and to explore the implications even when we don’t think they’re going to take us where we want to go.

Now, this is not to say that our experience and wisdom shouldn’t determine how we structure investigations, or how we approach problems. Experience is the best teacher–whether it’s our own or someone else’s.

It all sounds easy. But no matter how hard one tries, there will always be a time that you’ll be standing at the front of the room looking at a bunch of people holding their noses.

Real Tools for Kids

Posted on March 9, 2012 by TJK

Reblogged from MAKE:

Recently, while looking online for woodworking tools appropriately sized for my preschool daughter, I came across some construction sets geared toward children. Thinking fondly of the sets I had when I was little, I looked closely to see if I could find one suited for my kids.

I was intrigued by one kit that promised “real” construction play. While the kits that I played with in elementary school typically included glue, nails, and a rough picture of something I could build with a hammer and maybe a saw, this kit included foam “wood,” plastic tools, and plastic nails.

The Benefits of Owning Your Ignorance (or Running Barefoot)

Posted on March 8, 2012 by TJK

This morning I was out running with my beautiful wife. We’re both dipping our toes into a more natural style of running, and were out working on our form in our new shoes. In choosing to transition to natural running my wife and I took different routes. I started off by buying a more minimalist style of the Sauconyshoes in which I’d been running and which I loved. I did a little bit of research, and the science behind natural running seemed convincing. I told the guy at the store what my plans were and that I wanted a shoe that would help me with the transition. I asked what he thought of the Saucony Kinvara. He told me that if I truly was looking for what I said I was looking for, it is a great shoe. I bought the shoes and started running in them.

My wife also did her research. She did a lot of research. She talked to people who loved natural running and people who told her not even to think about it. She told everyone she talked to that she understood nothing of the science or philosophy behind minimalist running, and she listened to what they said. Then she went to a store in Shepherdstown, WV–about an hour and a half from DC where we live–called Two Rivers Treads. My beautiful and brilliant wife–did I mention that my wife is also brilliant?, She’s also a little obsessive, but that is for another time… Anyway, my all around extraordinary wife spent probably an hour with the guy in the store while I went to have tea with the boys. She asked a lot of questions. Again, she listened. She got great advice and a fantastic pair of New Balance

I was so impressed with Jennifer’s research and reasoning that this morning I broke out the Merrell Barefoot Trail Glove running shoes I’d purchased a while back started practicing the forms and techniques I’d seen in the videos Jennifer forwarded. Which brings us to this morning. We started off, based on the advice of the experts at Two Rivers, with a very short run in our new shoes. We then changed back into our old shoes and finished off our run, still trying to replicate the more natural technique that came so naturally in our new shoes.

As we left the house, I could feel the difference immediately running in my Merrells, and I could feel it again putting my Kinvaras back on. In the new shoes I was light, fast and in spite of getting used to the new technique comfortable. In my transition shoes I was less light, I sank in the padding, and although I was comfortable, I didn’t feel as efficient or in touch with the ground.

So in the end this post isn’t about running, or the benefits of going natural. It’s not even about how much smarter Jennifer is than I. It’s about owning your ignorance. Had I owned up to the fact that I knew very little about natural running, and that I didn’t in fact know exactly what I wanted. If I had not been afraid to look stupid in front of the guy at my local running store, I would have learned much sooner how liberating minimalist running can be. I would have been more efficient and not spent a week out of commission because I was afraid to ask about proper technique when I bought the Kinvaras. I would have been happier, perhaps, running for the last 9 months. Too often we’re afraid to own our ignorance. We’re afraid to let on that maybe we don’t know. Maybe we’re scared. Maybe we’re confused. The story of my running shoes could have been any one of a hundred stories that make the same point.

As a teacher, I have time and again been reminded of the importance of owning my ignorance. Being in a position where experience and our administrators tell us that we are supposed to be in control, that we are the guiding light in our classrooms, it becomes easiest and safest to shine our light only in only one direction–straight ahead. We fear exploring subjects in which we have no experience or of which we have limited knowledge. We need to have the answers we feel, our students are depending on us. In the end we learn nothing new and our students don’t get to experience the freedom of running barefoot, so to speak.

Owning the fact that there are things about which I know little, but am very willing to learn, has opened up new opportunities for my class and I to learn together, without fear of being wrong. It has also allowed me to learn from my students. Because, yes, there are things that they know that I don’t. When students see that I am willing to know less that they know, and to let them teach me about things (like technology) that they know more intimately, they are empowered. It has the added advantage of making me appear uninformed rather than just plain stupid as I try to fudge my way through difficult questions.

STEM or STEAM (or STEAMM)

Posted on March 6, 2012 by TJK

In order for America to remain competitive–or more accurately, to regain our competitive edge–we need to focus on education. Specifically, we are told we need to focus on STEM education–Sience, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Prophets (as well as charlatans) of growth, economic development, and good public policy from the White House to the school-house to the work-house tout the importance of STEM education to the nation’s future. These advocates of a new American exceptionalism see a future tied to the steady progress of science, the power of innovative new technologies, the efficiencies of enlightened engineering and an understanding gained through the judicious application of mathematical principles to an ever-increasing cauldron of useful data. In large part, they are correct. Our educational system is hopelessly out of date, we are not educating students for the present let alone for a successful, self-directed future. STEM education recognizes the need to keep up with new discoveries and changing technology, to build an understanding of the hardware Unfortunately, this vision of the future comes up wanting in some important ways, with STEM education reifying false partitions between the “serious” disciplines of science and mathematics, and the more “liberal” and “fine” arts–the very areas that are spurring new innovations that will shape our future.

A growing chorus of voices, however, is not so much eschewing the call for STEM education as it is questioning the completeness, and yes even the wisdom, of an educational paradigm that neglects the arts. This chorus calls for reconsidering the STEM movement, to develop a more complete STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Art) paradigm of education. The reasoning goes that without arts education, future workers will lack necessary creative and collaborative skills that are increasingly important. John Tarnoff’s recent piece in the Huffington Post does a good job making the argument that many of the new jobs created by the technology boom are in fact in creative areas. “Companies want workers who can brainstorm, problem-solve, collaborate creatively and contribute/communicate new ideas,” Tarnoff notes. And those workers are not always easy to find. There is, therefore, a basic economic argument for creating systems and policies that encourage STEAM education.

But is an economic argument the only way to justify STEAM focused education? I won’t get into a long discussion on the nature of education (publicly funded education in particular), or ask whether we shouldn’t be considering factors beyond worker training when developing goals and drafting policy– educating an informed and able citizenry for example, or promoting democratic ideals and ethics. No, what I’m talking about is a more basic principle, but one that continues to be demonstrated as we evolve socially, culturally, and technologically. I call it the principle of connections.

We too often divorce the “hard science” disciplines from the arts (and here I include the liberal arts), just as we often assume that “nature” and “technology” (or even industry) are mutually exclusive, perhaps even conflicting ideas. Throughout history, however, such dichotomies have been consistently discredited. It is equally as wrong to assume that the engineer or scientist lacks creative capacity as it is to write off the observational, technical and analytic skills of the artist or philosopher. From Leonardo da Vinci to E.O. Wilson our greatest scientific thinkers have also often displayed immense artistic talent, each grounded in their abilities to observe, analyze, document and most of all imagine. In fact scientists and engineers are among the most ardent advocates for STEAM over STEM thinking.

There is one more connection, I’d like to add to this discussion, though. That is making, or the manual arts (would that be STEAMM education?). Shop classes, home economics and all forms of manual learning (what we might call labor) continue to be stripped from our school curricula in order to make room for more reading, writing, science and math. From a purely economic standpoint this makes little sense, especially in light of the Obama administration’s focus on bringing manufacturing strength back to the American economy. From an educational standpoint, though, it’s nothing short of disastrous. Instead of stripping manual arts from the curriculum we would do better to more thoroughly integrate them into every aspect of learning. Math, science, art and all the rest would likely benefit from providing hands-on experiential opportunities for students to learn. Take students out of the classroom and away from the textbooks and computer screens for a significant part of each day and lets see if achievement (not to mention satisfaction) doesn’t increase.

Tinkering–Epilogue

Posted on March 2, 2012 by TJK

On February 29th, The New America Foundation, Slate and Arizona State University hosted Tinkering with the Future:Will the DIY Movement Craft the Future?. I hate to be a spoiler, but the answer is pretty much YES, makers, tinkerers (tinkers?), crafters and the like will play a huge role in our future economy and culture creation–if we do it right.

There is no point in my going into a protracted summary of the afternoon’s events. You can watch a webcast of the symposium here.

Some highlights to look for:

Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law School and author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires explains how tinkerers created the twentieth century as we know it. He talks about how the technological innovations we all know, love and need (or at least wouldn’t know how to do without) were, for the most part, created by amateurs working away in their garages (both literally and figuratively).
Dale Dougherty, Founder and Publisher of Make magazine, and Tom Kalil, Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy answer questions about the maker philosophy, who makers are, governments role in harnessing the innovations of makers and promoting the maker ethic and the economics of the maker movement. In this conversation, moderated by David Plotz, Editor at Slate, Dougherty and Kalil discuss the fundamental contributions makers will have on the economy and on society as a whole. They also get into some discussion about how our educational institutions need to learn from and emulate the maker ethic. It’s interesting to hear Dougherty, the maker and Kalil the wonk compare notes.
Annie Lowrey’s conversation with Mitzi Montoya, Dean of the College of Technology & Innovation at Arizona State University, and Jim Newton, Chairman and Founder of TechShop is incredibly interesting for it’s educational implications. My favorite part of this conversation is the answer each gives to my question about what kind’s of technologies we should have in our schools. Again, I hate to be a spoiler, but Newton responds that we should put all shop classes back into schools, while Montoya lists three things that she thinks every student should study: Art, Shop and Programming. Who would have thought someone named Mitzi would be so smart.
Journalist and Author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, Jeff Howe explains briefly how he coined the term “crowdsourcing”, and gives an enlightening talk about how opening up problems to a wide undefined audience can reap huge results. He sites as his example InnoCentive. The website set up to crowdsource answers to important (and profitable) scientific questions. Howe does a much better job than I can at explaining exactly how this works. But he sites three remarkable findings that I’ll mention here: 1) 1/3 of the problems posted on InnoCentive are solved. A remarkable ration when you consider that these are problems that the brightest minds in their respective fields have worked on, sometimes for years. 2) There is a pronounced positive correlation between the the researchers who solve a particular problem and how far outside their area of expertise the problem is. Basically (but not exactly), the less they know about a field, the more likely they are to solve a problem in that field. 3) For the problems that are solved most of the people solving them knew within twenty minutes that they could solve the problem–remember these are problems that the best minds in the field have often spent years on.
The final two discussions, Crafting the Do-It-Yourself Economy and Can Our Patent System Support (or Survive) the DIY Movement? are both fascinating conversations. The first focuses on the future of employment–the future nature of work, actually. A topic that is important to educators and policy types because it should be informing how we build our current systems and educate young people. The second looks at how a broken patent system (or at least a system that has not kept up with modern technology) could either stand in the way of the DIY ethic, stifling innovation and the economy as a whole; or could encourage open platforms, tinkering at the edges and real innovative potential. Both are definitely worth watching.

Corvidae Corvus

Thoughts on Learning: observe, ask questions and create

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