Technology Impact on Learning

The featured article on the front page of the Sunday New York Times a couple of years ago was entitled “In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores: An Arizona School District Embraces Technology, to Uncertain Effect.”  The premise of the article was that a particular district that had spent significant sums on increasing their technology and placed great emphasis on integrating technology into the classroom, experienced flat test scores on the state standardized tests.  Various educators weighed in on why this might be so – that teaching technology has taken away valuable time from math and language arts, that this is a very high performing district and that their scores predictably should have had incremental increases at best. Some saw it as remarkable that the scores stayed flat rather than declining.  The most vocal detractors felt that the enormous expenditures for technology was premature since there was no adequate data to support this effort. 

Advocates argued that the investment in technology has allowed greater classroom differentiation as children could work at an individual pace.  They also note that the technological skills that the students are acquiring are needed in a modern economy and that teaching with technology is far more engaging for students than traditional methods of teaching.  Not noted, but something that I considered is that the very characteristic that allows for creativity and innovation means taking some risks where the results are not yet fully known. 

The main point in the article about increased technology use and flattened test scores presents a logical fallacy that would have been laughable had it not tapped into a fundamental disconnect in our society. The correlation of these two items (high technology and flattened basic skills) should not be mistaken for causality (that the former created the latter). Assuming that use of technology would improve basic  skills in the classic standardized tests is equivalent to arguing in the nineteen fifties that the wide scale adoption of the ballpoint pen (instead of the fountain pen) led to declines in spelling test scores. 

Fallacy aside, the article really highlights two different groups who have very different understandings of the purpose of education.  The advocates for technology are a proxy for those who believe in innovation and twenty-first century skill development against those who argue for primacy of basic skills.  Each group makes meaning out of all of this in such different ways that they speak essentially different languages. The advocates raise compelling reasons for the wide use of technology; however, they acknowledge that there are no measurements to support their use.  I do question why they haven't created the measurements that would support their contentions for use.  It is possible, though not excusable, that the detractors might not accept their data as it would likely not be data about basic skills that they believe is the core of education.  

Therein lies the crux of the issue – what is the purpose of education and of testing and/or data collection? What would be compelling data for all involved?  In the case of this school district, it was to decide about the cost effectiveness of the technology initiative in the school.  The problem with trying to understand this in a public school setting, is that not all participants in the system share the same purpose of education.  If one believes that basic skills is the sum total of an excellent education, than the way in which technology is being used in these schools will not produce the data to support its use.  If technology were only used in the service of basic skills, than the outcomes on the standardized tests should show some growth.  If on the other hand, one believes that basic skills are a given at a particular level and that twenty-first century skills are of equal or greater value, then measurements need to be developed that show this. 

The problem is that the article, and it would appear the players in this drama, see all of this as a zero sum game.  It is not, and both must be considered.  I am so proud that our school has taken the initiative to test a variety of technological innovations and to pilot a new type of assessment to measure the critical thinking.  Our first set of tests in fifth and eighth grade will be administered in the coming weeks, and we look forward to sharing with you what we’ve learned from these assessments. We know that we've struck a responsive chord in the field as so many independent schools are looking for the right measurements to track progress on these different dimensions of learning.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. G

Words, words, words.

We celebrate Shavuot this coming Tuesday evening through Thursday.  Interestingly, this holiday is less observed by American Jews than its counterpart harvest festivals of Sukkot and Passover (though all three are of equal import in Jewish tradition). The main theme of this holiday is the “giving of the Torah” – it is about the sacredness of text and of words.  Sukkot has its American counterpart in Thanksgiving (Sukkot was in fact the inspiration for the pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving) and Passover’s theme of freedom parallels dominant American themes.  But I would argue that Shavuot’s theme runs counter to the way American’s think about words and texts. 

Everyday, we hear conversations that are hurtful and mean-spirited. There are verbal attacks on television, at athletic events. There are television news shows where people interrupt one another and call each other names, and there are shows where there are orderly rules of debate with highly scripted conversations.  For children, as for many adults, the former type of show is adrenaline generating and the latter is a snoozer.  This context poses enormous challenges for society in general and for schools in particular.

Mean spirited discourse is not new.  History is replete with examples of name-calling and bad behavior exhibited by leaders and heroes. Some of this may be connected to the ebbs and flow of the economy, to political turbulence, and to elections.  The Rabbis of the Talmud discussed communication extensively as they posited that the trust needed for peaceful society rests on caring communication.  The concept of civility originates with Cicero in the concept of “societas civilus” (in Teaching Tolerance, Chapter I, “Teaching Tolerance in the Classroom” from the Southern Poverty Law Center).  Cicero’s concept is not about “political correctness” or politeness.  Cicero understood civil speech as that which is filtered through how it does or does not contribute to the good of the city.(Ibid.) As we live in an increasingly me-centered society it is difficult to maintain that balance about the good of society overriding the good of the individual.

Mean-spirited communication and essays about it are not new, but the rapidity by which a message is broadcast and the reach of the message are defining features of twenty-first century discourse. I can remember my mom teaching me as a young child to write my angry thoughts down in a letter to the object of my anger (often one of my sisters), and then to destroy the letter and reconsider what I should say.  I also learned as a child to live by the idea of “sleep on it” when a communication angers me.  But our instant communication society makes those stances increasingly difficult even if they remain good council. 

School is the place where children get to hear multiple ways of interacting.  Some children come to school from homes where cursing is routine as is interrupting one another and name-calling.  So many are used to hearing rather strong opinions expressed with poor evidentiary support.  Many hear opinions stated as fact, leaving no room for the give and take of authentic conversation.  Our challenge is finding a way to bring this melting pot of behaviors together respectfully.  We aim to help all children maintain respect for their parents even as we sometimes have to say to some that “those words may be acceptable in your home, but not at school.”  In the classroom and on the field one of our most daunting yet important tasks is to hold our students to a respectful standard of communication even as they see other forms of communication outside of school.  Respectful, doesn’t mean perfect.  Children are very much in process and they must fall down and err in order to learn.   

What should we be teaching children so that we might have a chance at “civil society”?  Civil discourse is about expressing needs and hearing other people’s conflicting needs and perspectives.  It’s about careful listening – listening without judging.  It’s about remaining open to suggestibility – that your idea might in fact change as you take in new information.  How unfortunate that political pundits currently refer to this so cavalierly as “flipflopping” rather than the careful reconsideration of ideas that it often is.

In our school, it is all of this and it is about teaching children to make distinctions between opinions and facts.  We also teach children to support their assertions with evidence, and to identify the evidence and reasoning in someone else’s statement. There is a learning curve that has to take place between knowing this intellectually when one analyzes an essay, and knowing that this also represents a standard for behavior. This is a very long process with many bumps along the way.  But I do know that when our eighth graders graduate, they are ready to carry a torch of civil discourse into an often mean-spirited world. In the end, that is the meaning of “tikkun olam” (repairing the world) and that is the message of the holiday of Shavuot.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach (happy holiday),

Dr. G.

We’re not Settling for ‘Dayenu’

You know how your children often crowd around you when you return home from a trip or a meeting?  You want to engage with them, but you also just want to get in the house, put your things away and go to the bathroom.  I had that experience this Wednesday morning when I returned from an off campus meeting at 10:30.  As I entered my office, I was accosted by an eager, adorable bunch of second grade girls.  Before putting my things down, I listened to this energetic bunch.

They had organized themselves into “the green club” (I think that’s the title) and they wanted me to look outside with them to locate a suitable place for a mulberry tree.  Why a mulberry tree?  The second grade has been growing silk worms, and silk worms survive on a diet of mulberry leaves.  This year we have had a challenge locating mulberry leaves. The girls knew that if we had our own tree on our campus, then we would solve the silkworm diet problem. 

Before scouting the location of the future tree, the girls informed me that a) their club was not exclusionary – anyone could be a part of it (because that is a basic Wornick rule – no exclusionary clubs), and b) they had assigned each member of the club a job – one girl was responsible for shovels, another for water, the rest for raising money to buy the tree.  One was originally assigned “seeds”, but realized that it would take too long to grow the tree from seed so she is now responsible for locating a sapling to plant.  When we went outside to find a location, I asked them if they knew how much space a mulberry tree would need or how much sun or shade the tree needed.  Immediately, two of the girls were deployed to find that information. 

We came up with a couple of locations pending answers to the above questions.  In the meantime, I clued their teacher in on the search for information with which she would likely need to become involved.  She let me know too that based on all their excitement about this project, she will be assigning their persuasive essays around this topic – persuading me to let them plant their tree. And of course, I’ll be persuaded.  And I will see that the Judaic Studies teacher will share Jewish tradition around caring for animals and the environment.  This has all grown organically (pun intended) from the students’ problem-identification and it really is a wonderful example of project-based learning. 

The “best” in project-based learning (according to Ron Berger An Ethic of Excellence) begins with a real problem - ideally identified by the students, continues with research, seeks expert advice, restates the problem as new information emerges, includes collaboration, and serves the public.  The mulberry tree project is a perfect example of this. 

Five weeks ago during the Passover seder, we sang “Dayenu” where we recounted many miracles ending each sentence with “Dayenu” which translates as “it would have been enough if just this had happened.” The understanding is that there have been so many wondrous things that have happened, any one of them would have been enough.  We have our own “dayenu” here:

if the students had only stated the problem, dayenu,

if the children had only reached out to each other to solve the problem, dayenu

if the students remembered to open their club to everyone, dayenu

if the children had only assigned each other parts, dayenu

if the students had only taken responsibility for their parts, dayenu

if the teachers assumed “behind the scene” responsibility to deepen the students knowledge around this problem, dayenu

if the tree got planted, dayenu

if the silkworms were nourished, dayenu

It is clear that “dayenu” is not good enough for us.  Our second graders are a force to be reckoned with – can’t wait to see the wonders they will accomplish in twenty years.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. G.

A Very Blended Day

In the education world, there is a lot of talk about blended learning.  This can mean a lot of things, but it essentially refers to the marriage between technology-based learning and face-to-face learning.  Current research makes clear that learning needs to be mediated in many different ways – orally, digitally, aurally, kinesthetically, and so on.  Above all the best learning environments create engagement – passion.  We encourage students and staff to dig deep and think big thoughts and learn how to uncover meaning through methodical and sometimes tedious work. Big ideas and details matter, digital and face to face matter, the mundane and the spiritual matter.  This is why our school is always humming with activity.

Last Thursday, I had a visit from the director of DigitalJLearning based in New York – a group to which our school belongs that promotes digital learning in Jewish schools.  He noted all the examples of blended learning that was taking place on our campus that we tend to take for granted…and he encouraged me to get our staff to write up the many ways digital learning occurs in our school.  Sometimes it takes an outsider to shine a light for us on what we do well.  So, today I set out to observe as if I were a visitor to our special universe. 

I walked into one of the third grade classrooms that I had visited earlier in the week.  In the beginning of the week, Mr. Cohen was teaching the class about blogs and he set up a blog page for each student in the class.  He cautioned the children about the sorts of things that might be unsafe to share in a blog, and then they got started.  Today, I saw their blog posts which were responses to the books that each literature group was reading – I seem to recall that there were three different literature groups, each reading a different book by the same author.  Their assignment today was to read their classmates’ blogs and respond to them.  Every child logged on quickly, found the blogs and got to work responding.  Every child was engaged, and every child had taken the teacher’s suggestions to heart in developing his/her responses.

My second observation was in a second grade classroom. As I approached the room the teacher came out of the room laughing with unbounded joy about how her students were several steps ahead of her and that perhaps she was becoming irrelevant.  She shared the following:  yesterday, one of the literature circles had finished reading their book.  She had discussed with them the possibilities for their literature presentation to the class.  Today, minutes before I encountered her in the hall, the group had told her that they wanted to create a video presentation.  She said, “you’ll need to create the story board for your scenes, and write a script, and assign parts and work with Mr. Cohen to assemble the video.”  One of the children in the group responded “the script is done, the assignments have been distributed and Mr. Cohen is here to work with us on the video”.  This second grader had gone home last night and typed out the script, asked her parents to make enough copies for her partners and arranged for Mr. Cohen to meet with them today during literature.  Not only that, someone had highlighted each child’s script with his/her specific lines.  When I walked in on this scene, all five students in this group, along with Mr. Cohen, were huddled around a table, reading the script, making corrections and planning the video.

At the end of the day, I met up with the fifth grade teachers who had returned from a field trip to the Cantor Museum of Visual Arts at Stanford.  The class has been engaged in a poetry unit for the past several weeks.  Their assignment at the museum was to find a piece of art and write one or more poems about that piece.  The teacher recounted that you could hear students whispering to each other – “are you using free-form? Will it be a cinquan?”  It was a magical teaching moment of pure connection between the art of poetry and visual arts.  

This week, like many others before it, was inspiring.  Third graders participated in a Galaxy Convention – they brought in their inventions that would allow them to live best on their galaxy, and middle schoolers held a Zionist Congress.  Learning is moving at an incredible pace at Wornick and digital learning, in particular, has grown exponentially….so much so that we need to order a new computer cart and new computers for next year.  Every visitor that I met with this week noted the excitement around learning that is palpable at our school.  A Wornick education is about critical thinking, it’s about global awareness and it’s about learning to lead. And all of that is thrown into the blender of intense excitement and engagement.

Shabbat Shalom, 

Dr. G.

Incubating Creativity

I’m a bit of a book juggler – reading several books simultaneously.  Two rather similar books that I’m currently reading in snippets of free time are The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley and The Sorcerers and their Apprentices by Frank Moss.  Both books are about innovation and design.  The founder of IDEO wrote the first book, and Moss was former director of the MIT Lab.  Both uncover what they believe to be the source of their design successes.  Both believe that everyone has creative ability and both argue that great design doesn’t derive from the lone genius sitting alone suddenly struck by inspiration.

One new insight that emerged from my reading is that as the MIT lab and IDEO purposely create interdisciplinary teams, they find that individual team members do not always stay “in character”.  In time, a mechanical engineer may begin thinking like an anthropologist or like a medical technician.  These inventors are the new Renaissance people. 

They attribute their success above all to collaboration among people from different disciplines, to keen observation skills, and to giving employees the chance to try, to fail, and to retry.  As I read these books I ask myself two questions - what does this mean for how we educate children and how might this thinking apply to our teaching environment.  Are we encouraging “Renaissance people” who can see the world from different disciplines?  Do our teachers have the freedom to try new ideas?  The answer to both questions is “yes”. 

One of the first things that guests to Wornick notice is the purposeful engagement of students throughout the school.  If you walk into any class in our school, you will not find students exhibiting signs of boredom.  I would argue that this is in part due to the emphasis on creative thinking and collaborative learning. 

Research shows that “boredom often indicates a low level of creativity (Schubert, D. in Journal of Creative Behavior) and is related to a person’s abstract reasoning ability (Goetz, T. in Learning and Individual Differences).  The higher the person’s abstract reasoning ability, the less s/he expresses “boredom.”  I believe that there are two reasons that creativity and abstract reasoning mitigate boredom.  First, because the creative person or abstract thinker has the ability to use his/her mind to move out of the current, perhaps tedious, moment and think about another time or place. Second, s/he is used to “creating” – to taking action – rather than accepting the world as it is. 

How different people respond to a “boring” lecture illustrates the above point.  The person who has undeveloped abstract reasoning, simply dismisses the lecture as “boring” and spends his/her time focused on this idea of “boring.” The creative, abstract thinker, uses the time to let his/her imagination run – perhaps noticing the reactions of different people around him/her, or noticing the architecture of the building, or the trees outside. Perhaps, s/he stops listening to the lecture and instead begins writing a short story or sketches in a notebook while the lecture is taking place. S/he might even continue to focus on the “boring” lecture by formulating a careful response to the lecturer's position. 

In short, children who have been taught to develop their imaginations and to pursue creative outlets rarely experience boredom.  They know that they have the capacity to re-imagine the world in a different way, and they always can find something interesting to do as a substitute for a “boring” activity.  I do know that our Wornick education prepares children well for this. We have quite a few students who report to me that they spend their free time “ writing books”, composing songs, building forts and engaging in other similar creative enterprises.  

The next time one of your children says “this is boring”, let them brainstorm things that they can create. Help them use their imaginations, and then let them create. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. G.