Tag: Routine skills

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NCLB Narrows the Curriculum?

nclb logo
nclb logo

Periodically I think about the ironies of NCLB. Today, coincidence put a face on it. It started when I read an article from the Contra Costa Times, a SF Bay-area newspaper. “Schools Pile On English, Math Classes” details how NCLB can impact the curriculum. Middle and high school students pulled out of social studies, science, art, music, and electives to make room for additional classes in remedial reading and math. I understand that literacy and numeracy are necessary foundations, but shouldn’t they be imbedded into content of the very courses that are being cut? (For more on that point visit my website Content Reading Strategies That Work )

As the article noted,

Jason Ebner used to teach history at Antioch Middle School. That was before it became a thing of the past. Six years ago, he said, the campus began requiring two math classes for low-performing students. The following year they doubled up English courses. Social studies and science fell by the wayside. The practice has come back to haunt Ebner, who now teaches sophomore world history at Antioch High School. His students, robbed of history in junior high, increasingly come in without knowledge of the Renaissance period.  more

Today I also received a invitation from a local art-house cinema. One of my former high school students would be visiting Rochester for a special screening of his Sundance-award-winning film. I was one of three teachers he wanted to invite as “special guests who he felt contributed to his film-making career.”  I had lost track of him after graduation, but with some Googling I found that he was now working as a Brooklyn-based writer / director and teaching a class in the Dramatic Writing program at SUNY Purchase. If my memory serves me right, back in the late 70’s he was a student in my Media Studies class – a high school social studies elective that focused on the impact of the media on society – remember Marshall McLuhan?

I put the newspaper article and the invitation together and wondered about the direction some schools may take to reach NCLB’s goal of 100% proficiency by 2014. Will NCLB force a generation of students into the routine world of test prep? Will scores of innovative teachers will drop out of the profession?

While NCLB began with the admirable goal of narrowing demographic performance gaps and putting an end to sorting kids on the “bell curve,”  it may be doing just the opposite. Many low performing students are now banished from courses they might actually look forward to and sent to 90-minute blocks of remediation.  Ironically these low performing student tend to be from the very demographic groups that were falling behind in the performance gap. As if it isn’t enough of challenge to be poor, now you’re also shut out of art and music classes.

The “remediated” students may someday be “proficient” on standardized tests, but must that improvement come from the sacrifice of “soft skills” like teamwork, presentation and problem solving that they could have developed in project-based learning? As more courses are eliminated, will teachers be pushed aside in favor of computerized tutorial programs? Who’s going into education these days? My guess is – fewer creative teachers and more corporate service providers.

I wonder if someday a teacher will be thanked by a former student for helping their school to achieve “adequate yearly progress?”

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Jordan – Educational Reform for the Knowledge Economy

I’m writing this post from Amman Jordan, where I’ve been visiting family and seeing the sights. In addition, I took some time for professional contacts to learn more about education in this part of the world.

My visit coincided with the 4th Annual Arab Forum on Education held in Amman. Many speakers saw educational reform as important factor in addressing the high (15 – 20%) unemployment rates in Arab countries. Jordanian Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit noted that “improving the quality of education requires … clear evaluation standards, adopting self-learning and creative programs instead of rote learning methods.” Jordanian Prince Hassan said that “democracy and development could only succeed with a foundation in modern learning and the encouragement of creative thought.” He added that “schools should be more than mere teaching factories – supportive environments catering for the needs of individual students.” Jordanian Times 4.25.07

While traditional instruction in Jordan had been largely confined to teacher-centered lectures, the country has now embraced a new direction with its “ERfKE Initiative” – Educational Reform for the Knowledge Economy.  Jordan’s Ministry of Education is making a major commitment to reform their schools to support student development in critical thinking, problem-solving and the “soft skills” needed for success in the new information economy. It seems Jordan is moving in a different direction than the US, where NCLB dictates that the routine drudgery of test prep is more important than fostering student innovation through project-based learning.

I’d like to thank my two primary contacts who both took time to meet with me – Khitam Ahmad Al-Utaibi, the Youth, Technology and Careers Operation Manager for ESP (the ERfKE Support Project) and Maha AlShaer, Project Management Specialist / Education from the US Agency for International Development.

Einjaloot_2 I feel most fortunate to have been able to visit the Ein Jaloot Secondary School for Girls. (Click photo to enlarge.) I would like to thank headmistress, Thamar Yousef AlSoudi, for being a gracious host. Her school of about 700 high school students is one of the pilot sites for Jordan’s new “major” in Management of Information Stream (MIS). With USAID and corporate support, the Jordanian Ministry of Education has developed an online curriculum and web portal called EduWave. I got to see it in action in a class held in a computer lab. It was rather crowded by US standards – average classes are 40-45 girls in a room that was about 20′ x 30′. The teacher projected the online material via LCD. Flash files were used to illustrate the sectors of the Jordanian economy. As the teacher posed questions, every student seemed to be ready with an answer. I asked Maha if the girls where giving back “canned’ responses. She assured me that they were answering “in their own words” and that many of the comments were “personal opinion.” I was pleased to see the teacher wasn‘t just playing “guess what I’m thinking?”

Next, small groups of students took turns in role-play exercises. One scenario involved the owner of small shop explaining aspects of inventory management to a new employee. A second featured an unemployed engineering grad that started a computer repair business. I queried the teacher about the girl’s preparation for the role play. She assured me that while she provided the scenarios, the students had to research and develop their roles and dialogue.

What happened next was a welcomed surprise. Students broke into pairs and were asked to reflect on what they learned from the lesson and role-play exercises. They worked online in the EduWave portal, recording their comments in their network profiles. I was told that EduWave provides full suite of student, teacher and administrative tools including a portfolio builder, online assessments, and access for student and parents from home. Since it’s in Arabic, I couldn’t evaluate the material or interface.

My visit is far too brief to pass judgment on the education reform in Jordan. But I was pleased to see the direction in which it is moving. The teacher I met told me about how pleased she was to be able to be part of this new program. Instead of teaching a rather dull keyboarding class she was now utilizing new technologies alongside her students in a more dynamic learning environment.  Ironically too many of her teaching peers in the US no longer find their careers as rewarding. Once a beacon of innovative instruction, we are stifling American teachers as we chase an illusive “adequate yearly progress.”

Jordan is a country surrounded by turmoil and conflict. Nonetheless the educational leadership appears to be sincere in their efforts to modernize and prepare there students to be productive members of the new global economy. But one observation brought home the challenges of reform in a tradition-steeped culture. As Maha translated the girls’ dialogue during the role-playing, she repeated used the word “he.” Finally, I asked her if girls were role playing as men. She smiled and admitted all the parts the girls had taken were male. As she put it, girls would find it “awkward” to participate in a role play “as themselves.”

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Teaching Innovation in Routine Schools? Part II

On March 7, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified before Congress on changes needed in the nation’s schools and immigration laws. When your foundation gives away more than $3 billion, you earn the right to an opinion. He said, “the U.S. cannot maintain its economic leadership unless our work force consists of people who have the knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation.” For more of Bill Gates thinking on this subject see: How to Keep America Competitive Innovation requires both a strong foundation in content knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge in new ways – usually across a variety of disciplines. Thus it requires using all of Bloom’s skills from knowledge through synthesis and evaluation.

Gates envisions a workplace of the future characterized by innovation and change.  Workers will need to be flexible and able to adapt to new situations – self starters capable of working independently and able to readily change teams in an ever evolving work environment. Innovation requires thinking out of the box with the ability to learn from success as well as failure.

That doesn’t sound like the learning environment created by NCLB. Our schools are aiming too low – we force feed the content required for “adequate progress” as measured by standardized state tests. Too little time is left for student-centered, project-based learning that allows students to work at the upper level of Bloom. Innovation requires much trial and error (Bloom’s evaluation). Learning to self-assess your problem solving approach is not a skill fostered in multiple-choice test-prep environment.

NCLB correctly put the focus on student achievement. Our students will need a strong foundation in core concepts. But schools can’t be filled with routine tasks. They need to be fluid environments focused on helping students take responsibility for thinking and problem solving where there sometimes isn’t a right answer.

PS When Microsoft “borrows” the Mac OS “widget” and adds it to their new Vista OS and calls it a “gadget,” does that qualify as innovation?

For my prior post see “Teaching innovation in routine schools?”

Image credit Flickr/s.alt

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Teaching Innovation in Routine Schools?

Tough Choices or Tough Times
Tough Choices or Tough Times

On December 14, 2006,  the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, unveiled a report which should keep educators and policy-makers talking for months to come. Tough Choices or Tough Times, offers both a sober assessment of the challenge (Tough Times) and a radical proposal for reform of our educational system (Tough Choices). Executive Report  1.9MB pdf

Already the report is drawing both praise and heavy criticism. See: “U.S. Urged to Reinvent Its Schools” Education Week December 20, 2006. More 35kb pdf

The report assesses the demands of the information age / global economy against the current trends in American education. In our efforts to shore up the basic competencies of our students we have sacrificed creativity. Our schools have been taken over by the “test-prep” mentality. Typically that involves putting our student through relentless repetition of formulaic approaches to finding “the right answer.” More

As Washington considers the reauthorization of NCLB, I hope someone asks the question, “Why are we training our students to perform routine tasks, when routine work is increasingly done by machines and low-wage labor?”

As Tough Choices or Tough Times states, “A swiftly rising number of American workers at every skill level are in direct competition with workers in every corner of the globe. …If someone can figure out the algorithm for a routine job, chances are that it is economic to automate it. Many good well-paying, middle-class jobs involve routine work of this kind and are rapidly being automated.
…The best employers the world over will be looking for the most competent, most creative, and most innovative people  on the face of the earth and will be willing to pay them top dollar for their services. This will be true not just for the top professionals and managers, but up and down the length and breadth of the workforce.
…Strong skills in English, mathematic: technology and science, as well as literature, history, and the arts will be essential for many; beyond this, candidates will have to be comfortable with ideas and abstractions, good at both analysis and synthesis, creative and innovative, self-disciplined and well organized, able to learn very quickly and work well as a member of a team and have the flexibility to adapt quickly to frequent changes in the labor market as the shifts in the economy become ever faster and more dramatic.”

To prepare our students to lead productive and fulfilling lives, they will need both core competencies and opportunities to explore creative solutions that are “outside the box.” Let’s not forget “synthesis” – one of Bloom’s higher-order thinking skills. It’s been defined as: “Creatively or divergently applying prior knowledge and skills to produce a new or original whole.”

We can’t blame teachers for abandoning project-based learning when they get the message that we have to get “the scores up.” It’s time to refine our thinking about educational accountability.  We will need to produce a new generation of students with both solid skills and the ability to apply them in new and creative ways.

As the report concludes, “Creativity, innovation, and flexibility will not be the special province of an elite. It will be demanded of virtually everyone who is making a decent living, from graphic artists to assembly line workers, from insurance brokers to home builders.”

See new post “Teaching innovation in routine schools? Part II”