High Aspirations vs. Survival

Have you met a ten year old who says that his/her aspirations are to drop out of high school and get a high school equivalency diploma? No? Me neither. Most ten-year-olds want to be a doctor, teacher, police officer, or fireman when they grow up. 

When I was ten, I wanted to be an astronomer. The planets fascinated me and so did black holes; however, the more that I learned about astronomy and the math, tables, and science behind it, the less interested I became in it. Do I still love to star-gaze and hypothesize about outer-space and beyond? Sure, but I'm not going to ever become an astronomer.

Somewhere in the throes of late elementary, middle school, and early high school the aspirations of young kids change. There are a few who are stubborn enough to only want to be one thing when they grow up. However, many move into a survival stage and somewhere in late high school/early adulthood they start to have a new dream.

For students who spend all of late elementary through high school surviving sometimes they don't finish their high school graduation requirements. These students will usually end up walking into our high school completion program. Many times these students have been in survival mode for so long that they aren't sure how to set a goal, let alone achieve the goal.

Our class Pathways to Success has helped students identify the coping skills that help them survive, but also challenges them to look beyond the high school diploma/equivalency diploma and ask themselves about what happens after that. 

In a recent meeting, one of the facilitators for Pathways to Success said that the students tend to be more motivated if they have a "carrot" dangling in front of them. If their completion of their high school credential is a ticket to a promotion at a job or the acquisition of the job itself, then they tend to have higher aspirations. If this is their eighteenth time beginning the program with no other goal than to get the high school diploma, then the students tend to be less likely to finish.

Those students who walk in and are in survival mode may finish the coursework they need to move on to college and career, but many are in the midst of life circumstances that prevent them from having the supports they need to continue on to becoming successful citizens.

Do high aspirations help your students be more successful?

The Adult Learner with Anxiety, Depression or Both

We've seen the memes on Facebook that show us how hard "adulting" is. For those who struggle with anxiety, depression, or both it can be even harder. Therefore, how do we in adult basic education make it easier for these individuals to receive our services that are fighting these chronic problems?

At Kirkwood High School Completion programs we're teaching our students how to define those barriers and move forward with their lives. At our largest population center of students without a high school diploma, our information sessions occur about four times per month. This introduces students to the Mt. Everest view of our programs and if they choose, they can sign up for the next step immediately following that session.

We've implemented a Pathways to Success course for students to really focus on some goal setting and building a cohort that can hold their peers accountable for "soft-skills" such as attendance and punctuality. This course meets about two hours two days per week for two weeks. Once a student has attended all four sessions of Pathways to Success he/she is finally able to work toward their high school credential.

We offer two paths to getting a high school diploma. One path is our Kirkwood Adult High School Diploma, while the other is the state of Iowa's equivalency diploma known has the HSED. Students don't choose which program is right for them until after their four sessions of Pathways to Success.

By implementing Pathways to Success our persistence rate is up from last year to this year. Our current enrollment for students that meet the federal (12+ hours) enrollment requirement is up from last year and the number that have stuck around to take a post test is also up significantly from last year.

Students that we typically see in our program are those who have spent the majority of their lives living in crisis mode and need someone to help them see that there are supports in place to help them. By taking the Pathways to Success course to lead off their journey into our program, it helps to keep them moving forward.

If you have anxiety, depression, or both the medical community attributes it to a mixture of biological factors and environmental factors. One of those environmental factors could be that the traditional school environment didn't work for a student. He/she then decided that working would be a better solution and life spirals and spirals and then all of a sudden the person is in their mid-twenties without a high school diploma and he/she gets laid off from his/her job. Or worse, a person walked away from school at 17 and he/she is now 55 and gets laid off from his/her job and needs a high school diploma to find a new one. These are environmental factors that contribute to having depression. Couple the depression with having no idea how one will be able to provide for his/her family and then you have anxiety with the depression.

As educators of adult learners it is our job to put the tools in students' hands to help them cope with the barriers life throws at us. It's to show our students that when "adulting" is becoming too hard that there are resources that are available.

How do you help your students who are fighting anxiety, depression, or both?

A Forgotten 21st Century Skill

Intrigued by a colleague's tweet about "Everyone you meet knows something you don't," linked to a TED Talk by Celeste Headlee. It starts with telling you to forget everything you've been taught about having a conversation and gives ten pointers for having an authentic conversation.

Is this a 21st century skill that we need to deliberately teach? Now that teenagers get an average of 100 texts per day, is it important that we show our kids how to have a conversation? Is it okay to be sitting next to someone and send them a text when you could just talk to them? I'm sure that there's varying opinions on this.

Please comment.

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.