Buzz Words

Last night, I participated in my second Theory of Action Task Force meeting for the Cedar Rapids Community School District. It was an experience that got me to think about what the beliefs around the big ideas were to focus on "Excellence for All." We discussed what was meant by all and what was meant by excellence. In small groups, we identified the key components of excellence and all as was reflected in our hopes for the district. Then we looked at survey data and identified 6 key components of what our actions should focus on.

Our big ideas as a large group were leadership, equity, innovation, culture/climate, student ownership, and student learning. My small group had grouped leadership, innovation, culture/climate, student ownership, and student learning together. We called it empowerment. However, it didn't make the cut when we came back together as the large group and needed to prioritize our big ideas. Once those were decided, we discussed in our small table group how we would draft a belief statement around two of those. Finally, we broke out into each of the 6 sections and created if-then statements concluding with "...and student learning will increase."

I moved my two feet to the innovation area, but as we concluded the evening, I wondered what does innovation mean. To me, innovation is trying new things with the expectation of failure before seeing success. It means that we are thinking outside of the box and not trying to re-create the same product over and over again. It also means embracing creativity. Innovation may not mean the same to you, your children, your neighbor, or your community. It is a buzz word that we use to mean that we're moving forward, but what is the specificity behind the word.

I am a proponent of personalized learning and collaboration, but those words are vague as well. Personalized learning to one person might mean that students choose one project to complete with no regard for seeing exactly where the student's needs are and tailoring the curriculum to meet those needs. Collaboration could mean the meeting of two minds or the meeting of many minds to be in the same room, but not solving any problems.

In Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating, Personalized, Blended and Competency Education, iNACOL identifies descriptors of common buzz words and checks for evolving understanding frequently. It also has a graphic that shows how student centered learning looks. The student is at the center and wrap-around services regarding students' overall learning picture are around the outside to make it personalized.

As educators, we need to be careful about using "buzz words" for the sake of using them. We need to be cognizant of the meaning of these words and find ways to make them meaningful to the larger community.

Graphic from: http://www.inacol.org/news/what-is-personalized-learning/ 

Why Meaning Matters

When I attended the Cedar Rapids Schools equity meeting in January 2016, the buzz words from the district were personalization and innovation. I was quoted on the news as saying personalized learning is a key component of equity. However, I struggle with words being thrown around without fully understanding the definition of them.

Natalie Abel shares in her blog post for iNACOL that we need to have common definitions so that we have a shared understanding of what words like personalized learning and innovation mean.

If the same words mean different things to different people, confusion and frustration can arise, and this creates a serious problem for schools and leaders. If we don’t use common definitions, communication breaks down and it becomes harder to learn from one another.

Personalized learning is so much more than handing a device to a student and saying here complete this activity online and then we'll prescribe your learning. Personalized learning means that schools teach to each student's needs and offer direct instruction, along with technology that enhances student learning and can identify where there are achievement gaps.

In Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education, iNACOL zeroes in on these terms and describes them in great detail. The definitions according to iNACOL's current description are:

Personalized Learning:

Tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests–including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn–to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.

Blended Learning:

Any time a student learns, at least in part, at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and, at least in part, through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace. The modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience” (Horn & Staker, 2013).

Competency Education:

In 2011, iNACOL and CompetencyWorks led a summit bringing together 100 innovators in competency education for the first time. At that meeting, participants fine-tuned a working definition of high-quality competency education:

• Students advance upon demonstrated mastery;
• Competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower students;
• Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students;
• Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs; and
• Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge, along with the development of important skills and dispositions.

As I have described personalized learning to my parents and older friends, they laugh and say, "I see this more like a one-room schoolhouse." I usually laugh along with them, because that's what I thought would make the most sense when tailoring to the needs of each student. Perhaps, though, we don't look at it like a one-room school house, but more like a school without walls defining where a student should be according to his/her chronological age.

As a parent, I made a choice, despite my child being chronologically able to start kindergarten this year, that she would attend the alternative kindergarten program and take another year to mature before starting full-day kindergarten. This has cost me more than an extra $6000 in childcare (about 14% of my salary), but for her to be successful in a traditional school setting, she needed one more year to grow. Alternative Kindergarten in our district focuses a lot on social emotional behaviors, but they also assess math and literacy skills. My daughter is doing amazing and her teacher tells me to keep doing what I am doing at home.

So when we look at traditional schools and classrooms, we group students based on their age and have them progress through each grade level without a lot of concern for how much of the content they know and they automatically advance with their peers. However, personalized learning allows for students to master content before advancing and for teachers to identify where the gaps in their learning may be. It also allows for continuous flexible grouping of students so that they can be taught in their zone of proximal development.

Promising Practices in Blended and Online Learning

I stumbled upon a white paper from iNACOL today titled Blended Learning: The Evolution of Online and Face-to-Face Education from 2008-2015. Reflecting on my own journey with online and blended learning from 2008 to now, I can see how transformative online learning has been during the past 7 years.

I finished my asynchronous master's degree in Educational Technology from MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, KS in July of 2008. Immediately after, I had to take some courses through a different institution to get my ESL endorsement. I was not a happy camper to move from asynchronous instruction to synchronous video-style conferencing at a facility that was over 40 minutes away from my house! Fast forward to the summer of 2009 and the institution that I received my ESL credits from had found a new virtual classroom product; however, they took the classroom and moved it online. It was still synchronous and you were still expected to attend at the time of the class. I survived, but I hated it. Since then, I have moved into a very niche position at a community college in Iowa and help students all over the state take courses online to meet requirements to graduate from their high school.

What I experienced from moving from an asynchronous course to a synchronous course is not best practice for online and blended learning. Online and blended learning is not taking the traditional classroom and moving it online. This is still a top down approach, where teachers are the keepers of information and they are flicking it out to their students. A true blended learning approach allows the students to inquire, investigate, present, collaborate, and reflect (iNACOL 2015).

In addition, online and blended learning is more than adding a few computers or devices to the classroom. Online and blended learning teachers are guides, coaches, mentors, and concierges. They invite students to use technology to find answers and collaborate with others. Sean Cornally, in his blog, Think, Thank, Thunk, writes These Misconceptions Are Keeping School in the 1960's. In this post he talks about how students are creating authentic communication with the greater community of Cedar Rapids and understand that their instructors at Iowa BIG don't have the answers.

I hope that we see continued growth of Iowa BIG for the foreseeable future, because as we are an economy built on information and services, we need future leaders capable of acquiring information, analyzing data, and applying new information in novel ways (iNACOL 2015)

In her February 7, 2016 The Truth About Wasting Time at Work article for www.forbes.com Liz Ryan writes:

We need to lose our “Production First” mindset in order to thrive in the 21st century. We are sixteen years in. It is time to wake up and see what really differentiates so-so organizations from outstanding ones. In the great organizations, we assume that the people we’ve hired are capable of doing their jobs on their own, and much better than we could ever do them.

 Yes! We need to realize that we are 16 years into the twenty-first century and those people, who have jobs that are not scrutinized by a time-stamp on everything they do are typically more happy and more productive than those who don't. The same argument can be made when moving away from a Carnegie unit for students.

For the last century, schools have been given the responsibility of filling in for parents while they work and it has been expected that school is the "job" of young people between the ages of 5 and 18. However, as employers become more flexible and allow more work-from-home opportunities and begin to pay by the task, not the hour, are schools able to adapt?

With the re-authorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act, perhaps we can move away from outdated accountability of making sure students have 60 hours of "seat time," and move to measuring growth. I see this as not only as differentiating the so-so employers from the outstanding ones, but also showing the difference between the so-so schools and the outstanding ones.

11 Big Trends of 2016: Post 11 of 11

Cloud Computing

For the computer geeks of the world, like my husband, they disagree with Susan Patrick, as her 11th point for Predictions and Trends of 2016 focuses on cloud computing. Their big beef with it is the name "cloud." A cloud is a series of servers that back each other up so that there is virtually no down time. However, platforms like Google for Educators (GEG) and Amazon Web Services are changing how, when, and where learning takes place.

A word of thanks to Susan Patrick for her insights and predictions for 2016. It's been fun researching, commenting, and thinking about the future for online and blended learning.

11 Big Trends for 2016: Part 10 of 11

Mobile Learning

The number of mobile devices in my house might surprise you. We have an iPAD, 2 iPod touches, 3 smartphones, and depending on if you consider them a mobile device or not, we have 3 laptops. Our blue-ray player and our Wii also connect to the internet and those are the devices on which we watch our television shows. 

The community college where I work has had anytime, anywhere classes for at least the last decade and was a leader in teleconference classes before that. Distance learning no longer requires the use of a building where sophisticated technology exists, because it's now in the palm of your hand. 

As we look toward the future, we need to plan for modular learning, flexibility and connections on the go. Patrick, in her tenth point, describes devices as ubiquitous and says that this invites multiple pathways for learning. I concur. 

Part 9 of 11: Neuroscience, Youth Development Research and How Kids Learn Best

Until last evening, I was a novice when it came to a "Theory of Action." However, last night I participated in the first of several meetings with the Cedar Rapids Community School District about a "Theory of Action." My summary of a "Theory of Action" is that is a series of if then statements that lead a district or program forward and uses a growth mindset to do so.

To begin our night we focused on what a "Theory of Action" is and what our jobs as stakeholders on the task force are. We had quick times for discussions at our tables, a carousel activity with breaking us up into different groups and then a recap of the district's progress on the five current goals.

The leaders of the group modeled good teaching strategies and kept us engaged in the learning. Our final task for the night was to evaluate where we were in regards to our knowledge on a "Theory of Action" and what our hopes for the task force were. My hope is:

I hope the theory of action provides all learners (leadership, faculty, staff, and students) with the ability to solve problems for jobs that don't exist yet with technology that we haven't even imagined.

One of our tasks last night was to describe a convergent use of a paperclip and divergent uses of paperclips.  A convergent use is to use an object as it was intended, in this case, to clip papers together. A divergent use might be a door lock popper, a bobby pin, a chip clip, or a zipper toggle.

My notes from last night referenced points that I heard at #inacol15 and points that I have heard economist Andrew McAfee and Sir Ken Robinson state on TEDTalks. Not only did the leaders of the discussion engage us, but I was able to make connections to my prior knowledge. Research has shown that any time a connection can be made to a student's prior knowledge the better retention he/she has for the subject.

In Susan Patrick's blog post from December 31, 2015, her ninth point is titled, "Neuroscience, Youth Development Research and How Kids Learn Best." She says that many times new initiatives in education don't start with how students learn best, but predicts that new learning models will put the knowledge of youth development and neuroscience at the forefront of planning and shaping new learning models.

Lukasz M. Konopka, department of psychiatry at Loyola Medical Center agrees. In his 2014 article Neuroscience prospective on education, he says:

We must embrace th individual and individuality. We must not assume that all children learn the same way and fit into convenient algorithims. 

This ties in very well to one of the TEDTalks that Sir Ken Robinson has given where he says that his identical twins are nothing alike and that the Victorian model of education did a really good job of outputting a student that fits in the box.

In "Skills Promoted to Aid Learning Amid Adversity" by Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week, Jan 30, 2013, the state of Washington is using research about the whole learner to assist those students with the most need in developing their executive function more. Philip A. Fisher, the director of the Stress Neurobiology labratory at the University of Oregon in Eugene has this to say:

"There's growning recognition in the research and education communities that beyond the 'three Rs' is the executive function."

For me, I make the connection that this is like Headquarters in the movie Inside Out (2015 Disney). In this movie, a young girl (11 years old) moves from the Midwest to California. Slowly, her islands of personality all come crashing down and she disengages from school. Researchers are confirming what educators already know, if a student's basic needs aren't met, then he or she will not be successful. To bring world-class education that use critical thinking and data-driven arguments, we need to pay attention to what neuroscience and neurobiology are telling us.

As I participate on the "Theory of Action" task force, you can bet that I will be questioning what is best for the students and how can we measure the growth with the wealth of knowledge that we now have in regards to neuroscience.

11 Big Trends of 2016: Part 8 of 11

Programming, Robotics and the Maker Movement

On her eighth point in her blog post from 12/31/15, Susan Patrick, President and CEO of iNACOL, says that "programming and innovative designs can and will change the world." She also mentions that it is as important in the rural parts of the United States as it is in the tech capital of the U.S., Silicon Valley.

Up until my participation in the iNACOL Online and Blended Learning Symposium, I knew that binary numbers were made up of zeroes and ones. I didn't know anything more about them than that, but by participating in a hands-on workshop where my peers, video, and some drill and practice taught me about them, I am in a mid-level of understanding about them.

From the We Are Teachers blog, they have this to say about the maker movement:

"The Maker philosophy prepares kids to solve problems their teachers never anticipated, with technology we can’t yet imagine."

In 1987 when my dad brought home our first computer, a Commodore 128, I am pretty sure that he didn't think that 29 years later we would be wearing technology syncing to our smartphones and tablets. As I look ahead to 2045, there will be many problems that I never anticipated and technology that I can't imagine right now. 

It is time for schools to embrace the Maker Movement, Programming and Robotics so that our children (in 29 years) will be able to solve the problems that we haven't imagined and use technology to solve the world's problems.