Why I'm off the Data Bandwagon

I'm a math guy.  Numbers appeal to me, and I tend to see the world in mathematical terms.

It's a blessing and a curse.  There's lots of problems that I face in my professional and personal lives in which thinking mathematically allows me to see things from a point of view that makes analysis, problem solving, and innovation easier.  I naturally see the connections between the beauty of art, music, architecture, science, literature, and math.

But, very few other people I know yell at their kids when the windshield wipers are on in the car because trying to calculate the number of wipes per minute for no reason while the kids are talking normally can be incredibly distracting.  And, I learned a long time ago that discussing math at a party is more dangerous to one's social standing than discussing religion or politics.  Partygoers rarely care that my favorite number is Phi.  It's as if me going on about it forever makes them think I'm irrational or something.

Image Credit:  Wikipedia

So, you can see why I was naturally attracted to the obsession with data that we've had in education for the past decade and a half.  Playing with numbers was fun.  Plus, there had to be a way to organize and analyze standardized test data into something meaningful that was good for students.

For years I was a data fanboy.   I've left that bandwagon behind, though.

What I've come to realize is that all the analysis, organization, debate, and discussion of data is meaningless if you are looking at the wrong data for what you are trying to accomplish.  Police departments don't check to see how many library books were checked out each month to reduce speeding on Main Street.

Here are a few of the realizations I grew into over time:

• No matter what the standardized test data says, the best remedy for any shortcomings will always be better teaching and/or helping kids with rough home situations get their basic needs met.  Always.  As a teacher, there's a whole lot I can do about making myself a better teacher.  Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, there's often little I can do about the latter.
• Looking at individual student scores on standardized tests is pretty much worthless.  If I'm Johnny's teacher and I don't know his weaknesses long before the state assessments, I'm not doing my job effectively.  Daily, in-lesson informal formative assessments should be giving me that information on a regular basis for every students so that I can meet each one's needs.  If I do know Johnny's weaknesses and strengths before the state tests, the assessment data won't tell me anything I don't already know.
• If teachers in a district/school aren't regularly using the data from daily in-lesson informal formative assessments to make course corrections to their teaching and their students' learning, that's where a district should be focusing its resources - teachers should be discussing best practices, how to replicate amazing lessons, analysis of awful lessons, etc.  And they'll know what lessons are amazing and which ones bomb by whether or not kids learned as evidenced by the daily formative assessments they are giving.  Discussing test data until the cows come home isn't going to help those teachers learn better pedagogy. 
• Standardized test data is useful for seeing curriculum gaps, large trends, and other more global issues in a school or district and it does have a use.  With that being said, focusing on standardized test data usually comes at the expense of focusing on formative assessment and pedagogy.  And the latter are the whole ball game when it comes to student learning.
• Value Added Models used to measure student growth are junk science.  I've never had one person be able to explain to me in any kind of clear terms what the formula is for figuring out such models.  More importantly, anyone who's ever done a science experiment knows that your data isn't valid unless you can isolate a variable.  It is impossible to isolate a variable using these Value Added Models.  You can't isolate a teacher's effectiveness when you can't account for home situation, hunger, hormones, apathy, drug addiction, abuse, etc.  So, basing decisions based on this data is absurd.  Value added models are an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.   
• You value what you measure.  State tests do not and cannot measure the things our students most need to learn in school:  critical thinking, innovation, empathy, adaptability, and learning to love learning.  Focusing on standardized test data moves our values away from that which is most important for our students.

I guess I'm not truly off the data bandwagon.  I'm just off the test data bandwagon.  I still believe that data is incredibly valuable and should guide our decisions.  I just believe that the data we need to be looking at most is in-lesson formative assessment data that allows us to help each student grow in the best possible way.  Using that data to guide our decisions maximizes student learning.  

I know that fact is inconvenient for those still on the big data bandwagon.  You can't put every teacher's formative assessment data in a spreadsheet for all to see and discuss the way you can with state test scores.  And, trusting teachers to do their job seems like an unpopular position in today's educational climate.

Growth is hard, and change is messy.  If we really care about students learning more and being prepared for their futures, we'll start shifting our focus toward the data that really matters. 

"College and Career Ready" is the Wrong Goal

Anyone having anything to do with education has been bombarded lately with information about how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are going to fix what's wrong with American Education.  This national curriculum is supposed to ensure that every student who graduates from an American high school will leave prepared for either college or a career.  On the CCSS website, this idea is clearly written into the mission statement for the standards:

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

The problem is that focusing on "college and career readiness" is the wrong goal.  Worse, it's a goal that will ensure that less students are prepared for college and/or careers. 

Let's break down that mission statement.

• The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.

This sounds great, but it's founded in a false belief that anybody can predict what stuff kids will need to learn to do the jobs of the future.  We don't know that.  Nobody does.  Our current elementary students will graduate seven to thirteen years from now in the years 2020 through 2026.  Think about this.  Seven years ago, smartphones like the iPhone and tablets like the iPad didn't exist.  Could anyone back in early 2007 have envisioned how mobile technology would change the workplaces we have today?  What makes us think that we can predict what the workplace of 2020 will look like? 

In December of 2012 Forbes Magazine came out with a list of the top 10 skills that 2013 employers were looking for in employees.  Almost all of these qualities were not content based.  They were not skills that could be neatly written into standards.  These are traits like "critical thinking" and "complex problem solving" that require experience with solving real world problems.

And proponents of CCSS will tell you that those standards are designed to do just that.  But they aren't.  They can't do that.  Because CCSS are designed to be used to judge children, schools, and teachers on standardized tests.

So, here's what's really happening instead of that experience with solving real problems.  School districts are rushing to buy textbooks that are aligned to CCSS so that students can pass those tests.  Teachers are being told not to stray from teaching the lessons in those textbook programs so that students pass those tests.  Students are being taught how to pass those tests.  Nobody ever solved a real problem in their community by working out of a textbook or workbook. 

Here's the truth:  Focusing and measuring what students know will always prevent you from focusing on what students can do.  And they can do amazing things if we'll let them.

• With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

I don't think anyone can argue with this.  I just don't believe that CCSS is the best way to prepare students for the future.  And I certainly don't agree that this is should be the end-goal of education.

Instead of focusing on preparing students for "college and career", we should be preparing them for life.  Heaven knows, there are plenty of people who were successful in college and/or are successful in their careers that are miserable.  How many times have we heard about wildly "successful" people who, when we define success as more than "how much money you make", aren't? 

We're missing the forest by focusing on the trees.

So, instead of preparing students for college and career, I propose that we prepare students for life.  Teach them how to think for themselves.  Teach them how to solve real problems in society.  Teach them to come up with creative solutions, to make a difference, to experience the joy of being kind to others, to leave their communities better, and to advocate for the things they feel passionate about. 

Instead of discussing a list of things our students need to know that was lobbied for and developed with money from large profit-driven corporations (that may or may not have our children's best interests at heart), imagine if teachers all across the country spent professional development time discussing project, inquiry, problem, and service based learning projects that allow our students to learn content while also learning the very things that will help them succeed in an unknown future.  Imagine if our focus was on student learning instead of "standards implementation".   

The beauty of this goal is that, along with leaving students prepared for life in ways that our increasingly narrowed curriculum cannot, it will also prepare our students for their futures in every way possible.

Teach them to think for themselves, to love learning, to problem solve, to innovate, and to connect with others, and there will be nothing they cannot accomplish.

They'll even be prepared to be successful in college or their future career.

Preparing our Students for the (1950's) Workforce

This morning, while getting ready for school, I was getting my daily dose of news by flipping through different stations on TV.  One station shared a Forbes report of the top 10 skills you will need to find employment in 2013.  They were:

1. Critical Thinking
2. Complex Problem Solving
3. Judgment and Decision Making
4. Active Listening
5. Computers and Electronics
6. Mathematics
7. Operations and Systems Analysis
8. Monitoring
9. Programming
10. Sales and Marketing

Watching this list unfold on the screen a belief that I've had for a while was reinforced.  Out of those 10 skills that are being sought in the workplace, we focus on exactly one of them in our schools.  And the way we go about focusing on mathematics is so damaging that the majority of our students graduate without a real knowledge of what mathematics actually is, let alone the ability to apply it to real situations.

We talk about graduating students who are college and career ready, yet we focus almost all of our time, energy, and resources on things for which neither colleges nor employers are looking.

Not only are we not preparing our students for the workplace of their futures, well beyond 2013 and the list above.  We're still preparing them for the factory jobs of the 1950s in which compliance, basic reading and writing skills and the ability to calculate were all you needed to be successful. 

The more we focus on standardized tests as the driving force in education, the more we make it impossible for our students to develop the skills they most desperately need.  You cannot measure critical thinking, active listening, complex problem solving, or any of the above skills on a multiple choice test.  As much as the corporate reform movement of the past 15 years has complained that schools are not properly preparing students for the workforce, nothing has forced schools to shift focus away from those skills our students most need more than the corporate reform movement. 

Our students need to be able to critically think, problem solve, evaluate difficult situations, and actively listen, yet we continue to put the greatest importance on multiple choice tests, ensuring that none of those things can be a focus in schools.  Our students need to learn to use computers, electronics, and to program, yet we put policies in place to prevent them from even taking the electronics they already own - the very electronics they will need to utilize in the workforce - out of their pockets. 

Basically, we have turned schools into places where we prepare students for the realities of our past.  While some overcome this insanity to become successful, pointing to them as a reason to continue with this broken system is like pointing to the 90 year old smoker as a reason to give our children cigarettes. 

It is time to confront the realities of the 21st Century.  We don't know what jobs will be available to our students in the future.  Many of them don't exist yet.  We do know that skills like critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making are becoming more important.  That should drive what we do in schools.

Ten years ago, the world was very different than it is right now.  The phone in your pocket didn't exist.  No smartphone did.  There was no such thing as an iPad or a digital tablet.  Now, those items are ubiquitous. 

My fifth grade students are 10 and 11 years old.  What will the world look like when they are looking for jobs?

I don't know, but I do know it won't look like the 1950's. 

So stop trying to force me to prepare them for that.

Math Education: We Need New Answers

Someone in my PLN shared this cartoon on Facebook this afternoon. (I'm not posting a picture of it due to copyright).  That, in combination with a discussion stemming from a blog post entitled "What is UP with Multiplication Tables" by Lisa Cooley in the Innovative Educator Forum on Facebook recently, led me to this thought:

We ask students to add 2+2 and expect them to answer that it equals 4.

They'd be better off if we asked them to find examples of when it doesn't.  

If Testing is So Great for Kids...

Imagine a situation in which you have the option to send your child to two schools.  Here are the two schools' mission statements:

School #1 - Our goal is to ensure each student in our school learns the standards that have been developed by our legislators, so we test them at every opportunity to measure their progress.  In order to prevent students from failing to meet these standards we eliminate music, art, physical education, and any other non-tested subject for students who don't test well in order to give them additional instruction on test preparation.  

School #2 - To meet the needs of an ever changing society and develop each student's natural potential, we strive to foster the unique talents of each individual through a comprehensive program of academic, cultural, and physical development.  Our collective goal is to develop life-long learners who can work cooperatively and collaboratively, respect and value the uniqueness of others, and think critically to meet the challenges they will face in their lives.

In which school would you enroll your child?  In which school would your child be more engaged?  Which would be more likely to provide an environment in which learning thrives?  Which would prepare them for their future better?  

Then why are we spending so much time and money trying to force our public schools to be more like school #1?  

If testing is so great for kids, why aren't the expensive private schools that legislators and CEOs send their kids to demanding more testing and changing their mission statements to be more like school #1 above?

Maybe it's because the standardized testing movement has nothing to do with what's best for kids.

Should We Still Teach Cursive Writing?

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook a few days ago:

In the comments, I was one of the few who didn't agree that the lack of instruction in cursive was a huge problem.  Now that we are 12 years into the 21st Century, it's about time we start focusing on the skills our students will need in this century.  We need to be teaching kids to collaborate, create and innovate, communicate effectively, and think critically.  Not doing so makes school irrelevant to them.  What makes us think that someone would be engaged in a learning process that is irrelevant to them?

Cursive writing does not aid in collaboration in any way.  It doesn't help students become more innovative.  Cursive writers do not think more critically than those who print.  Today's communication is not done in cursive.  

We should be teaching students to communicate in the way they will need to in their world.  How much of your communication with your colleagues is done in cursive?  How much is done electronically?  

If we continue to teach our students things because "that's what we learned in school," we will continue to produce a generation of graduates without the skills they need to be successful.  It's time to prepare students for their futures and not our past.  

Friday's Five - What to Do With Your Textbooks (Now That They're Obsolete)

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page. 


Let me just get this out of the way upfront.  I despise textbooks.

I also have a big problem with anyone involved in education who cares more about political agendas and profit than what's best for my students.  For that reason I despise textbook companies.

Photo Credit: Michael Essany

That may sound harsh, but I'm not using hyperbole. Tamim Ansary, a former textbook editor, does a great job of summarizing the problem with our textbooks in his article A Textbook Example of What's Wrong With Education.  James Loewen, a former textbook author, describes many of the same problems in more depth in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Both are worth reading.

The good news, though, is that textbooks are becoming obsolete by the minute.  The ubiquity of computers, iPads, smartphones, and other portable devices makes accessing information instantaneous and easy.  I've yet to come across any information in the 5th grade textbooks that are provided to my students that couldn't be found on-line for free.  As an added advantage, differing viewpoints and opinions are offered on that information allowing my students the opportunity to analyze and evaluate that information.  You'd be hard pressed to find a textbook that made kids use those higher-order thinking skills.  At a time when school districts are facing debilitating budget cuts, textbooks are decreasingly being viewed as necessities.

When I've had discussions with others before and suggested that we should get rid of textbooks, I often get asked, "How will teachers know what to teach, then?"  My usual response is that they should try teaching their students.  Teachers need to stop using textbooks as a crutch that allows them to simply deliver instruction instead of teaching.

So, in the age of free and easily obtainable information, iPads, and Google, I asked my PLN on Plurk, Twitter, and the Teacher's Life for Me Facebook Page to suggest ideas for using the textbooks in your room now that they are obsolete.  I'm appreciative to everyone who chimed in with great ideas, both practical and satirical.  Here are five ideas for your textbooks:

1.  This idea came from @emprimrose on Plurk.  She suggested turning the textbooks into storage boxes for students.  In addition to being incredibly practical, it looks like a fun activity.

2.  In my classroom, I use textbooks to support our technology use.  Literally.  My classroom projector is propped up on old textbooks so that the image fits nicely on our classroom whiteboard.  One leg of the table in the front of my room is shorter than the others.  I've got an old book leveling that out as well.




3.  @SStephensC200 on Plurk suggested packaging up the books and shipping them to classrooms in countries that are less affluent like the Philippines and those in Africa.  She mentions that shipping costs are one drawback.  I can see a great opportunity for a service learning project here.  How great would it be for our students to help others in another country by raising the funds to send them books?



4.  Textbooks (and outdated encyclopedias) stack very nicely.  Allow your students to get creative by using books to build something.  @cmay inspired this idea by sharing the picture on the right.



5.  Lately, everyone from the CDC to Chinese police forces seem worried about the impending Zombie Apocalypse.  @nkrahn suggests saving the textbooks for just such an occasion, claiming that nothing kills a brain better than a college textbook - both when read and when used as a projectile.


Now it's your turn.  What do you think we can do with our obsolete textbooks?  Share your best ideas in the comment section below and pass the post along to friends and colleagues via Twitter, Plurk, Google+ and Facebook so that we can hear their ideas as well.  If you'd like to suggest and vote for future Friday's Five topics, or join in the discussion on ways to improve education, please stop by A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook and click on the "like" button.

Friday's Five - What Every Social Studies Student Should Be Learning

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page. 

Flickr/Topeka and Shawnee Public Library

This week I switched things up by placing a poll on the A Teacher's Life for Me Facebook Page to ask you what you'd like to see me write about.  The four choices were:

• "Great Ways to Use Voicethread in Your Classroom" 
• "Hidden Educational Gems in Walt Disney World"
• "Important Things Every Social Studies Student Should be Learning"
• "Why the 'Traditional Way' is Holding Our Math Students Back"

While every one of the topics were chosen by some, the majority of those chiming in wanted to discuss important skills our social studies students need to learn.  With federal and state focus on standardized testing our students are getting less opportunity to learn vital lessons that are best taught in our social studies classes.  Here are five vital skills and ideas that our social studies students should be learning from early elementary school straight through high school.

1. Identifying Bias - Now that we are in the internet age, we are constantly barraged with information.  Students need to understand that all of that information is being given to them with an agenda.  The same news story on Fox News is being presented differently than it is on MSNBC, and kids (and their parents) need to know how to sift through the opinions to get to the fact.  We often teach Social Studies out of a textbook, but the process in which textbooks are developed leads to books that are so biased that they often do more harm than good for our students.  To combat this, schools are increasingly looking to use on-line content.  Obviously, with the number of people putting information on the internet, identifying the agenda within content is vital in order for our students to understand history.  
2. There are very few absolutes.  The United States (or any other place) is not a perfect country.  We've done a lot of great things, and quite a few things that aren't so great.  Eliminating the controversy and blemishes makes history dreadfully boring, and robs students the opportunity to learn from past mistakes.  Who would watch a movie where the main character went through life without problems or mistakes?  There's no plot.  At the same time, teaching kids that some countries, or groups of people are all bad is harmful.  There are very few absolutes in life.  Teaching kids to look at all sides of an issue is much more important than any nugget of information we could give them.
3. "Why" and "How" are much more important than "Where, When, and Who." - Often social studies class consists of a bunch of dates, people, and places that kids have to know about and spit back on a test.  The real lessons in social studies are within the "Why" and "How."  Instead of teaching students only that the Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791 and what each bill says, ask them to find out why some colonists thought those protections were needed, how some colonists fought against them, and why two of the proposed amendments weren't ratified. (Although one of them did eventually pass and become an amendment in 1992.)  Facts are great for winning Jeopardy, but the real thinking comes from debating the reasons those facts came to be.
4. Identifying Sources and their Validity - Our students should be taught to question everything that is told to them.  This is something that is greatly lacking in today's society.  How many times have you received forwarded e-mails, seen Facebook posts, or heard someone talking about something as fact that is clearly fabricated?  Students should be encouraged to ask teachers "Why?" and "How do you know?"  They should learn to find who is responsible for the website they are reading, the source of the information in the Wikipedia article to which they are directed, and the motivations of the cleverly named organization behind the political campaign ad they just watched.
5. It's OK to disagree, but you better bring strong facts to the debate.  Students are usually taken aback when I ask them their opinions for the first time.  When they do answer, it's usually by parroting what their parents have told them, or what they think I want to hear.  They need to start thinking for themselves.  We should be asking them whether they agree or disagree all the time in our social studies classes.  We also should be demanding that they back their opinion with fact.  Students need to understand that to truly debate a position, they should be able to argue the opposite side of the argument as well.  Only then can they be sure that it is not their emotional bias that is blinding them.  The more we demand that students take a position and back it up, the better they will be able to cope with the bombardment of opinions they face outside our classrooms.  

Flickr/Sprengben

Now it's your turn.  What skills do you think we should be teaching our students in our social studies classes?  How do you teach the skills and ideas listed above?  Are there any that you disagree with?  Please share your ideas in the comment section, and pass the post along on Twitter, Google+, Plurk, and Facebook so that we can hear their opinions as well.  Also, if you aren't a fan on Facebook yet, stop by the Facebook page and click the "like" button so that you can chime in on future Friday's Five topics, discuss ways to improve education, and receive new posts in your news feed.

21st Century Learning: We Need to Change How We Teach

I developed this presentation for a graduate class I'm going to be teaching in a few weeks, and I thought it was worth sharing.

The Future Will Force Us to Change

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Dr. Michio Kaku on what scientific advances will change our life in the next 90 years.  The lecture was sponsored by the Lackawanna County Library System and was free to any member of the public with a library card.  Over a thousand people attended.  Every seat in the theater was full, and many people stood without seats to hear what the future has in store for us.

Dr. Kaku began by telling us about scientific advances that are already being explored and that will be part of our lives by the year 2020.  One of his reoccurring themes was the fact that computers and the internet are going to be so inexpensive, ubiquitous, and natural to us in the future that everything, including our clothes, wallpaper, toilets, and toothbrushes will be "smart."

As he discussed the year 2020, Dr. Kaku showed us contact lenses that would be connected to the internet.  Apparently, the military is already working on something similar.  Information would be available to you instantly without anyone knowing that you are even searching or getting it.  One of the humorous moments was when Dr. Kaku mentioned that, "The first people to buy these contact lenses will be college students taking examinations."  As I chuckled, I immediately thought to myself, "I don't think many high school teachers or college professors would think that is so funny."

I've often written about the need for us to change the focus of education from delivering instruction of fact to teaching critical thinking and innovation.  It seems as though the technology of the future is going to force our hand.  Right now, information is becoming more and more pervasive in our culture.  We teach students things that they know they can Google in less than 30 seconds on their cell phone.  Students believe that the education we are providing is irrelevant because of this.

Within the next decade students won't have to pull out their cellphones, and we won't be able to prevent them from wearing contact lenses in the classroom.  They will be connected to to an almost infinitely large network of information.  When that time comes, schools will be forced to make the changes I mentioned above.  The focus of our assessments, and education in general, is going to have to change from low-level thinking recall of information to gathering information and using it to create, innovate, problem solve, and communicate with others.

Why not make those changes now, before technology forces our hand?

Friday's Five - Myths in Education

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you, my readers, to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page.  If you'd like to make suggestions about future topics or discuss topics I bring up on the blog with others, make sure you click the "like" button on the right hand side of the page to join A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook.  Don't be shy about sharing the blog and Facebook Page with others.  Each post has a "Tweet" button on top and buttons on the bottom that allow you to share in several ways, including e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

We live in an age where information is free and easily accessible.  There are many benefits to 24-hour cable news, high speed internet, and social networking.  Many of my previous posts have focused on ways that we can prepare our students for the information age.  Being able to identify bias and misinformation is of paramount importance when being constantly bombarded with new facts, ideas, opinions, and theories.

In this post I'd like to examine a few beliefs about students, education, and schools that are both widely believed and untrue.  These myths about education are holding us back in developing the 21st century education system that our students deserve.  They have permeated our culture to the point that educators often base decisions on these bits of misinformation.  Many people call for "educational reform," but until we are willing to focus on the learning process of each student, "reform" will continue to mean change that benefits a few people in position of power.

Myth #1 - Failure is a bad word.

Our fear of failure has crippled us.  Failure is an opportunity to learn.  One quality shared by all successful people is the ability to learn from mistakes.  Walt Disney was in financial ruin and had lost his most well known character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to a competitor before creating Mickey Mouse.  Abraham Lincoln lost a senate election before becoming the greatest of American presidents.  We could spend all day making a list of people who failed and then became great success stories.  We focus so heavily on the "right answer" in class and not on the critical thinking that goes into decision making that we rob children of the opportunity to grow from their mistakes.  We focus on correctness and not on learning.  As a result, the one thing our children learn best is that failure is not something to learn from, but something of which to be ashamed.  Imagine a world in which people, companies, and governments did not learn from mistakes, but rather repeated them over and over again.  That world will soon be a reality unless we start teaching our children to think differently.

Myth #2 - All students need to learn the same information.

Do you think that Steve Jobs, Maya Angelou, Yo-yo Ma, Warren Buffett, and Lady Gaga needed to learn the same content in school to become successful?  Do we really believe as a society and an educational system that the ability to find the right answer to math calculations and getting the main idea from short passages are what paved the way to success for those who achieve it?  Successful people have a few things in common, none of which is reading and math ability.  They are innovative in their fields.  They are passionate.  They understand others and how to communicate with people.  They learn from failure.  These are the things that should be focus upon in schools.  The information that students learn should be determined by their strengths and passions.  I'm sure that Lady Gaga didn't need a high school computer programming course or Algebra II, but that Steve Jobs would have found both interesting and useful.  We need to allow our students to identify that which will allow them to be successful, and then provide the opportunity to pursue those passions.  Standardization kills greatness and promotes mediocrity.

Myth #3 - The teacher is the most important factor in student achievement.

I'll be the first to say that teachers should never use parents or a student's home life as an excuse for a student not learning.  Actually, I did.  Doing so allows us to stop examining what it is that we can improve upon in our own practice.  With that being said, however, a plethora of studies show that socio-economic situations are a vastly higher factor in student success than the teacher in the classroom.  Several recent studies have shown that student achievement in US schools with low poverty is higher than schools in countries that have similar low poverty levels.  Those same studies show that our high poverty schools perform as well as those in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Until we begin to address the inequities in how we fund schools and the issue of poverty we will never be able to claim that we are doing a good job of educating our future generations.

Myth #4 - Good grades are an indicator of future success.

This myth happens to be based on past fact.  A few decades ago it was true that if a student worked hard, attended school, and got good grades that they would be able to find a good job.  It simply isn't true any more.  Due to the speed at which knowledge is growing, we are preparing our students for jobs that don't even exist yet.  Employers aren't looking for workers who are good at reading, 'righting, and 'rithmatic anymore.  They want employees who can think on the fly, bring new ideas to the table, and adapt to rapidly changing economic environments.  Those are things that are all but ignored right now in schools, and certainly don't show up in a student's grades. 

Myth #5 - Teachers will improve if we provide financial incentives.

I think that everyone agrees that it would be fantastic to have a great teacher in front of every student.  The question becomes "How do we develop those great teachers?"  Merit pay seems to be the current focus.  The problem is that most teachers don't know how to get better.  Most teachers were educated in a system that was well designed for the factory model of the Industrial Revolution.  The college courses they took were rooted in the same model.  For the past decade we have not only followed the same model, but have taken it a step further by focusing increasingly on narrow standardized tests that are the ultimate example of a desire to place the importance on knowing information rather finding and using it.  In order for us to improve the quality of our teachers, we need to provide them the opportunity to learn how to prepare students for the 21st century.  They need professional development.  They need to be encouraged to network with other teachers, discuss great pedagogy, and share successes.  They also need to be allowed to take risks in their lessons, have lessons fail, and learn from their mistakes.  Merit pay allows for none of those things.  It simply provides more money for teachers in better socio-economic areas and punishes teachers working with our most needy students. 

Now, it's your turn.  What are your thoughts on the above myths?  Do you disagree?  What other popular beliefs about education are holding us back from giving our students opportunities to learn?  What suggestions do you have to overcome such misperceptions?  Please share with us in the comment section and pass the post along to others, both inside and outside education, via Twitter, Google+, Plurk, or Facebook so that we can hear as many points of view as possible. 

All Students Deserve the Opportunity to Love Learning

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This morning I was part of a few Gifted IEP meetings.  For those unfamiliar with the process, every year students who qualify for either special education services or gifted services have their Individualized Education Program (IEP) reviewed by a group which includes several people, including the parents and a regular education teacher (me).

While they varied slightly from each other, each student's Gifted IEP included an emphasis on "higher-level thinking," and a focus on learning topics in which they had great interest.  These students will get an education where they get to explore what they love and learn how to think.

Each set of parents that I spoke to mentioned similar stories of how their children loved school.  Their children couldn't wait to start learning again at the end of the summer. They see their time working with the gifted teacher as the highlight of their week.

I kept coming back to the same thought.  Why aren't we doing this for all children?

Don't all children deserve the opportunity to love learning?

Perhaps if we allowed children to pursue their passions and learn about what they love, a lot more of them would feel the same way about school.  Instead of force feeding the entire class some lousy textbook passage about the apple harvest (or any of the many other topics most kids find mind-numbingly boring) and beating them over the head with questions that are designed just like those on the state test, we could allow them to pick a topic they care about and let them research it.  Let them create a pamphlet for others who care about the same subject, design an awareness campaign for a charity whose mission they believe in, or share their research in any of a plethora of other ways that allow them to innovate.  Either way they learn to read non-fiction, find the main idea, generalize, and all the other skills that are in each state's standards.  Only one way allows them to enjoy the learning process, though.

Only allowing students the opportunity to learn about subjects they love will foster the life-long learning, mentioned in so many school mission statements and instilled in students by so few schools.

Perhaps if we focused on teaching all students higher-level thinking skills instead of that which is required to pass state tests we wouldn't be talking about why the United States trails so many other counties in science and math, why so many students are unprepared for college when they graduate high school, and why students see no relevance in what they learn in school.  Teaching students to think is really the most important thing we can teach them.  The attitude that only gifted students are capable of higher order thinking is both factually wrong and detrimental to the rest of our students.  The difficulty of a task and the level of thinking required are separate entities.  All students, including those in special education, kindergarten, Advanced Placement Calculus, and gifted classes should be required to use such skills on a daily basis.  Not having that expectation is akin to preparing our students to be automatons who cannot think for themselves.

Gifted students need to be allowed the opportunity to maximize their talents.  They should be allowed to follow their passions in school.  They should learn how to reason, debate, think critically, and use their unique abilities to develop innovative ways to change the world.  We should create an environment where they are able to use their God given ability to soar as high as they can.

All other students deserve the same thing, too.