The Biased Observer©
Education
Five Days
If we need to add five days to the school year, then do so without delay--but we don't. At best this creates the illusion of progress. To add time without benefit of a true root cause analysis succumbs to the spin doctoring of politics--come up with a solution and then manufacture a problem to match it. The state educational system has enough real problems that we can identify. Teachers are underpayed, overworked, and underappreciated. Administration is top heavy and mismatched to meet today's needs. If the state superintendent wants change, do something that produces a viable return. Increase pay for our teachers so we retain our best and flatten the administrative hierarchy. We cannot afford administrators at any level that are parochial directors or consumers of information when they need to be servant leaders. Retrain them to ask every educator within their purview, "How can I help you be successful today?" Revalidate every administrative position and report. We have always done it this way is not a validation. Subject both to the scrutiny that their business peers face daily. What return do you give us? Let's recruit and retain the best and brightest to work on the front lines of education, and educate all others to truly support them. Then you will see change for the better within current time constraints.
Intelligent Design
Should intelligent design be taught in public schools? As a Christian and as an American I say without hesitation, absolutely not! Any version of creation that could be agreed upon by a state department or local board of education will certainly be a sanitized, politically correct version of what should be taught by individuals, families, and churches in accordance with the faith and insight of each.
The real issue must be that evolution should be taught only as a theory. It is not a fact. It is an intelligent guess based upon the broadest application of inductive reasoning applied to a proportionately small number of facts. We need to teach our students logic and reasoning before introducing them to theories. The most elemental component of logic is that if the premise is false, then everything that follows can be proven to be true. Evolution is based upon an assumption or premise. Belief in a divine creation is based on faith. We should address this issue at the core by the direct teaching of thinking and reasoning skills in our schools. When our students can effectively discern what is based in faith, assumption, fact, emotion, theory, or guesswork; then we have better prepared them to use their education regardless of the curriculum.
Some Thoughts on School Days and Summer
What's up with school starting earlier this year? We've gone from starting public school after the Labor Day Weekend to the first week in August. I immediately think of the analogy of the frog tossed into a pot of boiling water--it jumps out of course. The same frog placed in warm water that is increased in temperature by a degree a minute will likely stay there until it boils. Are we turning up the temperature in our schools a degree or two each year? I'm not talking about the air-conditioning bills for cooling our schools during the hot days of August, though that should be a consideration. I'm focusing my thoughts on the dwindling days of summer.
There are certainly strong arguments for education on a continuous basis. Many skills atrophy over the course of a long summer. The fault in this logic is that it presumes all education is conducted in the public school system. Most institutes of higher learning have included something in their mission statement about partnering with business to produce a graduate better prepared to enter the workforce. Few have moved this beyond placing these words on paper or on their website. I offer an alternative to starting school so early that may also have benefits in the latter area. Start it earlier!
First reactions to such a proposal are usually outright rejection. But if we take this provocation--and that's what it is--a provocation, perhaps the strongest of the Lateral ThinkingTM tools, and use it to move us to a new idea we may reap some benefits. How much earlier than the already too early start to school did I have in mind? I think that students, especially those in middle school and high school, should start school the day after it lets out for the summer. School should end on a Monday and begin again in the next grade on Tuesday. Tuesday through Friday would be used to orient students towards their summer assignments. These assignments require no textbooks or classroom time. Students would select two or three assignments for each of their new classes, and the preponderance of these assignments would require research and reporting. Libraries, courtrooms, and local businesses provide the research laboratories. As access to the Internet becomes more and more ubiquitous, at least some of the assignments should require use of this medium. Books and online reading must share equal time with hands on experience and face-to-face interviews. The summer job, family vacation, church camp, or softball tournament offer learning opportunities that are often overlooked or at best under utilized.
Reading and writing would certainly take the poll position in this summer agenda, but there are plenty of opportunities for summer study in the areas of math, science, and technology. Did you ever meet a small business owner that couldn't use a little help with the accounting paper work. On average, summer assignments should require about eight hours each week. Assignments could be completed consecutively, concurrently, or in surges as individual projects.
Supervision immediately jumps out as a likely problem. The old axiom, that which is not supervised is not done, certainly applies. What is to keep students from putting off all of their assignments until the week before school resumes in a classroom setting? These assignments could be used as a test of self discipline, but failure during these summer months only digs a hole from which the marginal performer must climb out of once classroom sessions begin. While an increased level of independence will certainly make transition to higher education and the workforce much easier; there is a recurring requirement for challenge and support during these summer months. Anyone with experience in leadership, management, or education knows where this is going. Students will need summer mentors. The task of the mentor is not that of a teacher or tutor. The mentor is someone with more experience that can balance challenge and support for an individual or group of individuals. My ears are burning with the cries of teachers everywhere that see their summer break vanishing with incorporation of this concept. I believe the contrary is the case. While the junior students would receive very tangible assignments; the more senior ones would receive multiple assignments as mentor for their summer education. Want to see real growth and education--give one individual responsibility for the success of several others in a mentor-mentee relationship. Teachers could be scheduled to oversee these youth mentors with each teacher serving in an oversight role one week during the summer. While most teachers already make incredible sacrifices to give their students a better chance at academic success; this duty would actually give them more time off as classroom sessions could once again begin closer to Labor Day.
Will this bring havoc to the fall football schedule. I don't think so. Some minor adjustments may be needed, but nothing so drastic as to detract from one of the major student motivators to return to the classroom setting. Is this a drastic change from our current way of thinking? Of course it is, but it is a chance to incorporate what was learned in the training realms of government and industry over the last decade. That is that the appropriate metric for training and education is not hours or days spent in training, it is knowledge and skills acquired. This idea will take some planning, adjustment, and refinement, but it would significantly reduce the atrophy of student skills without further reducing the fleeting days of summer.
Privacy in Education?
Privacy and public safety have been at odds for the constitutional history of our republic. Now privacy and education are at odds in the new millennium, and education has lost the first round. The recent United States 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that prohibits one student to grade, see, or even handle another student's work may occasionally protect a student's self esteem, but it will cripple the real purpose of our schools--learning.
I'm not talking about the extra administrative effort that teachers will have to expend with no return on investment. They will find a way to abide by whatever rules are imposed and quickly find an efficient way to overcome the imposed inefficiency. I am talking about reducing the quantity and quality of instruction in the classroom. Grading papers is education at the one-to-one level. The grader learns, and if only a minimal amount of debrief time is scheduled, the grader's counterpart learns as well. Teachers do a great job in a one-to-thirty, one-to-twenty, or in fortunate cases one-to-fifteen or less settings. Time constraints significantly limit a teacher's ability to teach one to one. The concomitant of endorsing student grading is respect. A classroom where respect for one another is established early, engages every student as a teacher. An educational system with a mission of everyone teaches, everyone learns produces an environment where everyone wins.
I'm wondering if we must carry this privacy model out in earnest to abide by the court's decision. If so, then the participants and student observers at a school track meet should be blindfolded before the 100 yard dash or the 440 hurdles, so other students will not know how they finished. Does it sound like I'm pushing this ruling a bit too far? I don't think I am. If there is humiliation in performance--good or bad--it certainly must be applied across the full spectrum of education. You say that an exception would have to be made for safety--you can't have children run a race blindfolded. I say you have to make an exception for education in general--you can't create a sterile learning environment and then expect students to perform well in a world where they must balance diversity, criticism, teamwork, and personal goals.
I am all for defending the right to privacy that our courts have extracted from the Bill of Rights and made applicable to the several states via the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It is essential to protecting our personal privacy, especially in an age where technology offers more and more venues to invade it; however, public education is not a place where we should have the same privacy expectations that we do in our homes or our cars. We expect to give up elements of our privacy to learn.
Enough complaining without a solution--here it is. Until the Supreme Court has a chance to review this case, parents should waive their right to privacy with respect to grading and handling papers. We can waive our Miranda rights if we're accused of a crime. I believe we can waive our right to individual handling of student papers. I think that every school supply list that goes home in a few days should be accompanied by such a waiver form.
If your children were accused of getting an education, would there be enough evidence to convict them?
What Were You Thinking?
I think that the 10th Circuit Court's ruling on students grading and handling other student's papers may have been the best thing to happen to education in years. This is not because I agree with the decision. I don't (see Privacy in Education). The ruling is good because it can be used as a provocation for further thinking. This thinking should focus on answers, not scores.
The impetus of this focus should be on wrong answers. Students should be trained to examine each other's answers and through dialogue try to determine why a student answered a question incorrectly. Sometimes the product of this discussions will be only "I guessed." More often it will lead to the heart of education: "What were you thinking?" By causing students to focus on their thinking process, we improve the most essential skill they can possess.
A typical multiple choice (sometimes known as hazardous guess) examination often plays upon semantics or placement of decimal points. Discrimination among various distracters is an important method of evaluation, but barely scratches the surface of the further learning potential of the test. A well constructed multiple choice test offers distracters that have their roots in process discrimination and reasoning. Such a test also requires a considerable front end investment of effort by the examination's author and is far too great a task to impose upon the work load of our teachers. It is often too expensive to outsource this most essential element of test construction. So do we just recognize that we need tests that allow us to find the root cause of an incorrect answer and go on with business as usual because it is too expensive? On the contrary, we use the most readily available test experts we can find--our students. Student worksheets and practice tests should not only be discussed between and among students, students should be taught to capture wrong answers and the reasoning behind them. Then in a collaborative effort between students and teachers, the test should be constructed. My ears are already burning with, "but the students will know what is on the test!" That is correct. They will know why the right answers are right and the others are wrong. The process of learning will not be interrupted by testing as testing becomes an integral part of the process from the beginning.
I will concede that some scoring is essential to the grade-based economy of our public school systems. If some unknown element is required to provide the test score distribution curve, then 10 to 20 percent of each test could be constructed solely by the teacher, but within the parameters of providing distracters attached to root causes. Now that I've made my concession, I'd like one in return. Students should be allowed to cheat on their tests. By this I mean that they should be able to talk to other students to answer test questions. In fact, they should be assigned to teams or work groups for each test. Half of the test would be completed individually and half in the team environment. Success would not only be rooted in study and thinking, it would require unselfishness, teamwork, and service. "But I don't want my child dragged down by someone that's not pulling his or her part of the load," is cry in waiting of many parents. The solution is not segregation, but integration. With the exception of athletics, public schools focus on the individual. Once the student leaves the sanctuary of the school, he quickly finds that he must rely upon others and that others are counting on him or her. Business, industry, and government produce through teams. Society progresses through the interaction of its members. Why should we fail to teach this in our school system. We often ask why one generation does not understand service and another is self-centered. Part of the answer is that we taught them to be that way. We evaluate individual performance and relegate team performance and evaluation to the athletic arena. We insist upon school systems meeting the individual needs of every child when we should focus upon teaching our children to meet each other's needs.
Will these radical proposals work? Of course they won't, because I have left out one critical element. That element is the essential precept to all education and it is mutual respect. Every child must learn through instruction and example that everyone deserves to be treated with kindness, dignity, and respect. Lay this foundation early and the limits to education have no bounds.
Towards Learning
We're headed to Abilene with public education in this country. Most people agree that the quality of our education systems must improve, but we are focusing on many things that don't get us there. Testing, certifications, and technology seem to be at the heart of most solutions. These may be essential, but they are far from sufficient. The problem with where we are headed is that it does not bear the required relationship to learning.
I have discussed testing before and most of today's tests only tell us that a student or a teacher can pass a test. There is often no relationship between these examinations and learning. Certifications become a crutch to school systems where students are not learning. If all of the teachers are certified, we must be doing all that we can is the alibi of a struggling administration. Finally, technology is the panacea of the education world. Advocates of computers in every classroom see this as an end state, not as one tool among many. Computers cannot replace individual thinking and learning, nor should they. While I do not reject testing, certifications, or computers and multimedia devices; I do reject the mindset that providing these will produce better education. Education is not a factory. Students cannot be stamped out into a product with a label that reads, "certified in 14 competencies." What's missing from too many approaches to education is a quality approach to learning.
Learning is not the product of completing a course of education, though fortunately, some obtain learning as a byproduct of the process. Learning is an active process by each individual and often by groups. Learning requires a student investment in the education process. Obtaining this investment is the real challenge of education. Adult education does not face this same challenge. The basic premise of adult education is that the learning must have immediate application. While some adults learn for recreation or hobby; most want to put to use what they have learned. Students are told far too often that to get a good job, they need a good education. Though this premise is often valid, the return on investment is too far removed to motivate students to learn.
How can we close this learning motivation gap. I believe that the direct teaching of thinking skills will accomplish much of this. Year after year millions of students enter the public education systems of this country with the hope that they will learn. This hope is based upon the completion of some basic skills classes such as math, science, and language coupled with a variety of elective courses. What is missing is a class on how to think. Yes, some reasoning and logic are the byproducts of writing and higher math, but these pale in significance to what is needed. Students should be taught thinking skills that will enable them to learn as individuals and in groups. Logic, reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, and the role of emotions and instinct in thinking are all essential. I recently taught a class in parallel thinking to a group of professionals. Of the 58 in attendance, only two had ever received formal instruction in thinking--and that was at the college level. Thinking skills must be taught early and to all students.
Thinking skills alone will not close this investment and motivation gap. Students must also invest in the learning process with service. They must quickly understand that they have an obligation to their school and their fellow students. This is accomplished to an extent in athletics and some school organizations, but to be successful, it must become part of the culture of education. Two methods of service that permit students to help other students are mentoring and sponsorship. I have discussed the value of student-to-student mentoring previously, and will focus here on sponsorship. Sponsorship requires that any student entering a school system be provided with a peer level sponsor. This sponsor is responsible for introducing the new student to the rules, regulations, and nuances of the new environment. The sponsor is also responsible for conveying the concepts of service and student investment in learning to the new student. Such a concept is not new. It has been used in military units for many years. The benefit is that the new individual is quickly brought into the fold and not labeled as an outsider. Such inclusion at the adolescent level is even more important as those students that seek refuge in the education counter culture are often the most outgoing and receptive to a new student. Sponsorship requires training. A sponsor that does not believe in his own stake in education does more damage than leaving the new student to his own resources.
Have I offered a cure all for education in America, of course not. I do believe that we are only fooling ourselves by sticking to the testing, certification, and technology bandwagon as a direction for public education. Let's invest in thinking skills and service to complete this most essential process of learning.
Notes to this commentary.
Going to Abilene refers to Dr. Jerry Harvey's, The Abeline Paradox. The crux of this paradox is that organizations often do exactly the opposite of what its members believe is best and often defeat the purposes for which they were established.
Parallel Thinking is taught using the Six Thinking Hats®.
Books by this Author
Copyright 2005
Tom Spence