What's Become Clear

I’ve long preached that the measure we should look at when we talk about school change, is the degree to which our students are authentically engaged in the educational process. That isn’t a new thought by me, W. Edwards Deming said it something like this, every child should leave school loving to learn. If they did everything else would take care of itself. I couldn’t agree more.

The other day Dr. John Burke, my friend and superintendent at Haysville public schools, shared with me a student survey developed by the people at Gallup.The Gallup student poll. Check it out, it’s very interesting stuff. Here is the purpose and the three things the poll measures.

Purpose:

Through years of research, Gallup discovered three true indicators of student success; hope, engagement, and wellbeing. These three key factors drive students’ grades, achievement scores, retention, and future employment.

Hope: the ideas and energy we have for the future. Hope drives attendance, credits earned, and GPA of highschool students. Hope scores are more robust predictors of college success than are high school GPA, SAT, and ACT scores.

Engagement: the involvement in and enthusiasm for school. Engagement distinguishes between high-performing and low-performing schools.

Wellbeing: how we think about and experience our lives. Wellbeing tells us how our students are doing today and predicts their success in the future.

And it’s free! I don’t know if this is the best survey, but I know if Gallup created it it is completely research-based and valid and reliable.

It is my hope that in the near future when we talk about measures, and evidence, of school change and student success, that we have some measure of student engagement that has equal weight with standardized tests. – Steve Wyckoff

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During a conversation about school change an individual made the comment that we’d be fine if, “The kids would just bear down and be responsible like they used to be!” Interesting thought. This individual went on to say that students from foreign countries, especially emerging countries, come to America and kick our kids butts in school.

As you might guess, I have a different point of view on this. I think that if our kids got their drinking water from a hole next to their house they would be equally motivated to do what ever it takes to change their station in life. Fortunately this isn’t the case.

In an affluent society such as ours we are never going to return to the student behaviors of the past. It’s incumbent upon us as educators to create a system that meets the needs of society in such a way that it also engages our students as they’ve never been engaged before.

The other day while speaking at the University of Kansas to a group of teachers in the process of obtaining their certification to become building level administrators, I was asked if there has ever been a time in our history that our students were authentically engaged on a regular basis. The answer obviously, is no. But it didn’t matter. Our students were being prepared for a completely different society than we have today.

In fact, that’s part of our problem. We are still preparing students for a world of factories and mass production. A world where the most important skill was compliance. If you want to succeed in today’s schools, be very compliant, and act like you care. Guaranteed success.

Unfortunately, graduating from that system doesn’t guarantee success in life. In fact being compliant is the path to a job that has, low pay, high potential for being outsourced, or automated using technology.

The school change we need to make needs to be a thoughtful transformation to schools that prepare kids for their future in the 21st century. For us to attempt to make our kids adapt to our schools is utter nonsense! – Steve Wyckoff

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I’ve been watching Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking. Fascinating stuff. But it got me to thinking how boring all of my science classes were. So I tried to reflect on why they were so boring and these programs are so interesting. And then it hit me, these programs are a story, my science classes were a string of endless, meaningless, many times incomprehensible, facts.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not promoting students listening to stories over actually learning by doing. But If we are going to continue in the traditional “chalk and talk” educational model, at least do it in a story that’s interesting. Will the stories be more engaging? Probably a little, but they will be much more entertaining. And I guess barring actual engagement at least entertaining is more tolerable for our kids.

Not the school change I would ask for, or hope for, but at least less boring. – Steve Wyckoff

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Have you ever heard somebody say something and said to yourself, “That really make sense.” And then days later, or weeks later, or years later, and even decades later you realize how profound that statement was. Well  Phil Schlechty has one of those quotes. The first time I heard it I was intrigued but over the last couple of decades, as I thought more and more about it, I realized how profound it is. Phil said;

“A teacher’s job is not to teach kids, a teacher’s job is to create meaningful engaging work whereby the student learns the things we want them to learn.”

How profound. Phil also led me to understand how important authentic engagement is to learning. I don’t know if Phil decided authentic engagement was important and that led him to understand what the teacher’s role needed to be. Or if he analyzed successful teachers and saw that those that created work for the student, that was meaningful and engaging, led to engaged students. It may be a chicken or egg discussion.

But the reality is this, for students to truly learn, not just remembering stuff until the  standardized tests are over, they must be emotionally engaged in the learning process. Nothing emotionally engages students in what they’re learning more than doing work that is meaningful and engaging to them.

“Work” also implies that the students are doing something, not passively observing as the teacher does the work. There is a mountain of research that you only learn something, by doing something. My friend Roger Schank has led the research and the movement for learning by doing.

I think when you couple learning by doing, Roger Schank’s work, with Phil Schlechty’s theories, work that is meaningful and engaging, you have the recipe for students becoming remarkable. – Steve Wyckoff

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The idea of engaging students has long been an interest of mine. I suspect it goes back years to my first interaction with Phil Schlechty who enlightened me on the different types of engagement. Phil talked about four kinds of engagement; authentic, ritualistic, passive compliant, and rebellious.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this lately as I listened to the discussions about “motivating” our students on state standardized tests. We use everything from pep rallies to brides, for the kids and their parents, in order to raise test scores.

That’s what got me back thinking about Phil and his work. Over the years I’ve tried to motivate several individuals, with the appropriate skills and knowledge, to develop a survey that measures authentic engagement. There are many “engagement” surveys out there, but to the best of my knowledge they all measure ritualistic engagement.

So what’s the difference? Ritualistic engagement is characterized by stuff like the student always being on time the class, always turning in their homework, paying attention during class, etc. Authentic engagement is a much different animal. Students who are authentically engaged get “lost” in their work. They are so into what they’re doing that they lose track of time.

Csikszentmihalyi in his research called it “flow.” But there is a world of difference between true authentic engagement and pretending to be authentically engaged. As I’ve written before, I have the opportunity every semester to speak to almost 200 education students at the University of Kansas. I’ve done it for nine years. In each of those nine years I discussed the difference between authentic engagement and ritualistic engagement with the students.

I always end this discussion by asking them how many of them were authentically engaged on a regular basis in high school. I’ve never had more than 5% or 6% of the students say they were authentically engaged. But when I asked them how many of them had their teachers convinced they were authentically engaged, every hand goes up, and the room breaks out in laughter.

The point of this? If you’re truly going to make real school change you have to start by authentically engaging every student! Our teachers do a wonderful job of convincing kids to at least act like they care about the nonsense we do in schools. If we were doing things that were meaningful and engaging to the students, they wouldn’t have to pretend. – Steve Wyckoff

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I had the opportunity yesterday to play with the new iPad and as I was putting it through its paces I kept wondering, “is this the new technology that will lead to school change?” My friend Kevin Honeycutt had pre-ordered the new iPad and sat patiently on his front porch Saturday until it arrived.

This new technology is off the charts cool! Actually it’s an iPhone on steroids. All of Kevin’s apps from his iPhone work on his iPad. But in many cases their functionality changes dramatically simply because there’s a bigger screen. And in some cases there are some new applications.

As I played with it I kept wondering how might kids use this in school? Reading books on it is amazing. The lighting is perfect and I can control the size of the font, while still holding it just like a book. I can easily see books that we have kids read being downloaded and read right on their iPad.

And if you read my blog at all you know that I don’t type, I use MacSpeech dictate which is a speech to text software application. Well the new iPad has built-in Dragon speak. It may be even better than the computer version of the software since you don’t have to train it. For all of those kids out there like me who struggle writing, this free application could be a lifesaver.

I haven’t even talked about the Internet search capabilities. The iPad is blazing fast and is completely controlled by the touch of your finger. Students could use the iPad in class to instantly access any needed information. To say nothing of the engagement factor this technology would have on kids.

So what do I think the chances are that this technology will lead to school change? None. Once again, what we have kids learning and how we have kids learning, is completely isolated from modern technology and the modern world. Perhaps if somebody could show educators how this new technology dramatically raises standardized test scores then it might be adopted, until then there isn’t a chance. –  Steve Wyckoff

If you liked this post then check out Kevin Honeycutt’s post on Literacy Apps For The iPad.

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There is a growing conversation about the need for national standards. But do we need national standards? And what if they pick the wrong standards? I just finished Howard Gardner’s new book, Five Minds For The Future, and as always Dr. Gardner did a wonderful job. But, everything Dr. Gardner talked about, in terms of preparing high school kids, was aimed at preparing them for college. And the vast majority of our kids will not attend a four-year college and complete a degree.

In fact, only about 25% of our population ever finishes a bachelors degree. And, as I’ve stated before, more than 75% of our population will engage in work as adults that does not require a college degree. Less than a third of recent graduates at the University of Kansas obtained employment that required the degree they earned while at the University of Kansas.

So when we talk about national standards I can guarantee you that they will be designed to prepare every student to be admitted to a four-year liberal arts college. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is our students, in the 21st century, see those standards as boring and irrelevant.

Ask anyone, “If you ask high school kids to describe school in one word, what word would they choose?” The answer is almost universal, boring.

But we continue down this path as if establishing national standards that everyone has to follow will magically transform our students into highly engaged, well-educated, productive 21st-century citizens. It’s not going to happen.

We should be running 50 different experiments, one in each state, to see how best to prepare our students for the 21st century. How much evidence do we have to compile that centrally controlled bureaucracies are inefficient and ineffective before we unshackle schools to do its best for kids? -  Steve Wyckoff

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Rural schools may be an endangered species. I’ve written many times that I believe that our model in public schools for educating kids is obsolete.  I’ve also written that our goals in public schools are also all wrong. But if we are going to persist in that model then it will take a great deal more money in order to succeed. Unfortunately, especially for rural schools, we are in an era of declining revenue sources not increasing revenue sources.

So what do I see happening? The very existence of many rural schools is being threatened.  You can do the math. In the current model you have a minimum number of teachers necessary to maintain the system regardless of how few kids you have. You must have a teacher in each of the core curriculum areas and also teachers in the areas where students are required to earn credits.

There seems to be a minimum of about 10 professionals in a building to maintain it as a high school in the current system. With budget cuts many rural schools are approaching the point where, based on student enrollment and budgets per-pupil, they can’t afford the number of teachers necessary to cover all the required areas.

So consolidation becomes the default solution. But in many rural areas consolidation may mean closing schools and sending kids to neighboring towns. Unfortunately, those trips to neighboring towns may mean that kids are on a bus more than an hour one way. For the little kids this is unsatisfactory. For the older kids, many of whom are involved in extra curricular activities, there are a plethora of issues with sending kids that far.

But is there another solution to the problem? I think there is. But it will require us to take a very different approach to how we educate kids. It will require us also to change the mental models that students, parents, citizens, and educators have about how schools should look and operate. And I think the solution will lead to more highly educated students, who are much better prepared to be productive in the 21st century.

My solution, project-based learning. It can be accomplished with fewer teachers, in the case of very small schools perhaps with as few as half the number of teachers.

So how his project-based learning better for kids? My opinion comes from my observations of Erie high school. I believe that those students are receiving an education that is far superior to kids in other schools in terms of preparing them for the 21st century.

So the problems we face today may actually lead to  a more well-educated student population. While there are other solutions that will cut cost and do minimal damage to the current system, I believe that moving to a project-based curriculum is the only solution I’ve seen that will reduce cost and at the same time lead to more well-educated students.

In an era of standardized test mania, student scores may not look as good in project-based learning, although I think there is evidence emerging that project-based learning schools aren’t any worse than test preparation schools in terms of standardized test scores.  But in terms of what students gain; 21st-century skills, individualized and customized education, learning by doing, student engagement, and preparation for heuristic work rather than algorithmic work, there is no doubt that project-based learning is a much better approach. And it costs less to do. –  Steve Wyckoff

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Rex had a handful of students whose needs simply weren’t being met in a traditional educational setting. In fact, according to Rex, several of the young men were about to step away from becoming dropouts. But Rex, who readily admits that he was potentially one of those boys when he was in high school, knew the way to their hearts. He knew that if you want to hook a group of high school boys who are close to dropping out, and totally disengage from all school activities, the way to do it is in the car.

So Rex brought the boys together  to build a car. Not just any car, a 32 Ford roadster. Recently completed, the car was sold … for $31,000! That covered the cost of all the materials to build the car with something left over to put back into the program.

And the rest, as they say, is history. The program has doubled in size, has received many donated vehicles, and is well on its way to being a permanent fixture at Peabody-Burns high school. The students are working on their second 32 Ford, this time a touring car.

The program has all of the characteristics that make for great educational experience. The students are authentically engaged, in fact to the point that toward the end of building the first car the instructor, Matt, had to get permission to take some of the students home … at two o’clock in the morning! But it’s not just that the students are authentically engaged, in a learning-by-doing atmosphere they are applying  all of their academic learning in real situations.

I had the opportunity to visit with the instructor and the students last week.  Their stories range from hilarious to heartwarming. And all the kids have a story. But each individual will tell you what a difference the hot rod program has made in their lives. – Steve Wyckoff

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Last week was a hectic week but it ended on a positive note. I got to attend MACE, that stands for Mid America Computers in Education, in Manhattan Kansas. MACE is always one of my favorite conferences to attend, not so much for the presentations but for the people. You see, MACE attract some of the most innovative, and creative, nerd wannabes around the state. For the most part they’re classroom teachers who are figuring out new and unique ways to use technology in their classrooms.

Typically, the presentations aren’t always the best, but I appreciate how many of these individuals are teachers taking a risk to stand in front of their peers and present. Many for the first time. The kinds of things they are doing in their classroom won’t get the attention of Bill Gates, they are swimming upstream against the system and for that they deserve a lot of credit.

MACE is always well run and the location on the campus of Kansas State University is beautiful. But I’m still most impressed with the enthusiasm, creativity, and innovation that the educators present are demonstrating. I wish, for the sake of all these individuals, their efforts were leading to more systemic change. Unfortunately there isn’t much of that going on in education today. You see very few administrators, principals or superintendents, at MACE. That’s a shame because they could learn a lot.

The good news is you hear very little, if any, discussion about raising standardized test scores. The bad news is conferences that don’t focus on standardized test scores don’t get very much attention. Focusing on standardized test scores is politically valuable, focusing on the stuff that the educators present at MACE focus on  means better educated kids. Unfortunately, in schools today we’re more interested in raising test scores than we are in providing a better educational experience for kids. If test scores did as much to prepare kids for the 21st century as do the educators at MACE public education would be in a lot better shape. – Steve Wyckoff

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Even former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch agrees! Well she didn’t exactly say it’s a curse but she did say when speaking about No Child Left Behind, “… I’ve looked at the evidence and I’ve concluded they’re wrong. They’ve put us on the wrong track. I feel passionately about the improvement of public education and I don’t think any of this is going to improve public education.”  And I couldn’t agree more!

Her primary concern is the same as mine the emphasis on standardized tests.  I believe that we have created a culture of test taking skills, she believes we have created a culture of “cheating and dishonesty.”  I think that she believes the tests are important and that the scores mean something, I don’t think they’re important and I don’t think they mean nearly as much as we like to believe.

I see all too often schools that are focused on strategies to raise test scores, that have nothing to do with students learning more, and being able to apply the knowledge under real-world conditions.The net effect of the strategies is that our students by school more boring, and more irrelevant than ever. And boring and irrelevant are not desirable conditions for learning to occur.

However, it is encouraging that some high-level people, mostly former policymakers, are seeing that the top down, centrally controlled strategies for improving education aren’t working. Hopefully, those in charge will abandon these well-meaning but misguided strategies and focus on real systemic change that leads to the kind of educational system our kids need, and deserve, in the 21st century. – Steve Wyckoff

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Compliance or engagement, which is most important? I am often concerned when educators talk about engagement that they are actually talking about compliance. Let me give you an example. I’ve seen several surveys that purport to measure engagement but when you look at what they measure they talk about students who get to class on time, students who turn in their homework, students who don’t miss school, and students to do their homework. To me those are all issues of compliance, students are doing what they’re told, when they are told, and how they are told.

Engagement on the other hand is much more about students that are so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. So involved that they spend evenings and weekends working on schoolwork, not because they’re required to but because they want to.

But the most important issue around compliance and engagement is how well our students being prepared for their future. Students who are compliant are being perfectly prepared for algorithmic jobs. Those are the jobs that have established processes and procedures that lead to a defined correct outcome. That’s exactly what we prepare kids for in schools. Look at standardized tests, we want students to know exactly the right steps to come up with exactly the right answer. Algorithmic.

On the other hand, those jobs that don’t have established processes and procedures that don’t lead to one correct outcome make up about 70% of the new jobs being created in America. Yet in most schools little or no time  is spent with students in preparation for this heuristic types of work. Again, if you look at standardized tests they in no way reflect heuristic thinking.

So which is important compliance or engagement? Obviously the answer is engagement. Yet it’s not what we’re doing in schools. If we are going to prepare students for the 21st century  it’s important that they become self-directed, and problem solvers. And I don’t mean problems that have a well-defined process with one correct answer. For our students, having an educational system that is algorithmic by nature is boring and irrelevant. One of the keys to school change will be to quit focusing on standardized tests and instead preparing our kids for their future. That will mean making the educational experience heuristics in nature, not algorithmic. – Steve Wyckoff

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I spent a lot of time thinking about what needs to change in schools, how we do school reform. I also spend a lot of time listening to books. Over the last several months I’ve listened to six books that make great connections for me. I’d recommend the following six books for every educator.

Drive – Daniel Pink
How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer
Talent Is Overrated – Geoff Colvin
The Talent Code – Daniel Coyle
Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
The Element – Sir Ken Robinson

So what do all these books have in common? They all deal with motivation, learning, and great performance. Let me give you the Reader’s Digest version of what I took from these books, but please read them and let me know what you think their importance is.

First of all there is a common thread through the six that motivation and excellence are linked to interest. Individuals who have high intrinsic interest in what they’re doing are better learners. So for schools this means that we must allow students to have choice in what it is that they’re learning.  School reformer Phil Schlecty always said that teachers don’t know what their job is. He said, ” That a teacher’s job is not to teach kids. A teacher’s job is to create work that is meaningful and engaging to the student, whereby they learn the things that we want them to learn.” He’s right on target according to these authors. We have to give kids work to do, but it has to be meaningful and engaging to them.

The second thread that runs through these books is that there is no such thing as inherent talent. There are several studies that are referred to that show two things. One, and individual must spend approximately 10 years and/or 10,000 hours involved in the pursuit to become an expert. But time alone is not enough, the individual must also spend that time in what the authors referred to as, “deliberate practice.” That’s practice that focuses on improving each and every facet of the performance. By the way, the performance can be physical or cognitive, it doesn’t matter.

So what does that mean to us in schools? Well the sad truth is what we have students practice most often for 10 years and/or 10,000 hours, is passively being compliant. We ask them to sit in the seat, do what they are told, do it when they are told, and do it how they are told to do it. If they run into trouble we tell them to raise their hand and we will answer their questions, and solve their problems.

Our current system is designed to reduce the deficits that our kids have. We identify what they’re not good at and we try to raise them to mediocrity. What we should be doing is identifying what they are good at, and letting them become experts in that area. In the real world if you can shine at something you can be a success, in spite of your deficits.

Does that mean that we ignore their deficits? Absolutely not, but we should improve on those deficits as part of the deliberate practice they do in the area that they have a high interest. So they will become experts in an area with the supporting skills and knowledge necessary.

So schools, start figuring out how to create educational experiences that are, long-term, engaging to each and every student on an individual basis, and allow the student to become an expert in what rows their boat in the 21st century. – Steve Wyckoff

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We’ve never seen the kind of financial cuts that are taking place in education today. Regardless of how you feel about school finance, and the ability of school districts to utilize their money wisely, the cuts that are being made today in the majority of school districts are painful at best. Decisions are starting to impact staffing decisions, including classroom teachers.

But every cloud has a silver lining. And often times the silver lining doesn’t show itself until much later. School districts are looking at ways to save money, cut costs, and yet at the same time improve the quality of the educational opportunities their students receive.

Down the road we’re going to look back at the decisions that are being made and many of them will have historical significance. Some because they devastated the district, and some districts will never recover from those decisions. But others will lead to creative and innovative solutions that will indeed increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the education our kids receive.

Our industry has been amazingly stagnant for the last century. We are long overdue to redesign major parts of our educational system; what we teach, how we teach it, how we organize to teach it, and how we assess what we have taught. Hopefully,  we will talk about, what the kids learned, how they learned it, where and how they were grouped to learn it, and how they demonstrated their understanding and use of what they learned.

Hopefully there will be enough examples of creative and innovative solutions that they will impact the educational system systemically. What would I like to see those systemic changes be?

I’d love to see all of our students emotionally (authentically) engaged in their learning experiences  on a regular basis. I’d love to see the content of what they are learning be the knowledge and skills that will make them more productive in their lives after school. I’d love to see them organized like we organize for work in the real world, in ways that allow them to collaborate with their peers and with experts from the fields of their choice. I’d love to see us scrap the entire standardized testing system and instead evaluate student learning based on the skills and knowledge they obtain which are aligned with their desired career  areas. I’d love to see teachers functioning as cold learners with the students, assuming a much more Socratic role. And most of all I love to see our students leave school loving to learn, and self-directed in their lives.

Is there hope? Only time will tell. Right now there is little reason for hope. Almost all of the discussions are centered on what to cut. On the other hand I was at the Topeka USD 501 Board of Education meeting last night and they are doing a great job of discussing the changes they can make to reduce expenses while at the same time focusing on improved opportunities for all of their students.

We can only hope that education and educators don’t blow it. – Steve Wyckoff

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We have an interesting situation developing across the state of Kansas that I suspect has happened, or will happen, and many other states. With the recent financial crisis we are seeing a dramatic increase in discussions about virtual courses for high school kids. To this point in time there has been very little interest among K-12 educators to use virtual courses, but as schools get more desperate to compensate for reduction in funding, school administrators are warming to the idea.

But the dilemma on the horizon is this. In traditional schools it is not uncommon, in fact it is very likely, that students will show up every day, sit passively in class, do the absolute bare minimum required, and get a passing grade. It takes very little effort on their part to do enough to make it through the system.

However, as students begin to take virtual courses they are required to engage differently and more intently in the course. The reason this occurs is that there is not an adult at the front of the room simply “dishing out” the information to them. They must actively seek the content knowledge and do with it whatever is required.

For the highly engaged, highly motivated student, this isn’t an issue. But for the student who is not highly engaged and isn’t self motivated it creates a dilemma. These students may well be sitting in a school room ostensibly taking a course in a traditional sense, but they aren’t doing any, or much, of the work.

We have seen this situation before. Their expectation is, and the expectation of their parents is, that if they were in the room and it’s a course offered by the school, then they should receive a passing grade and credit for the course. The conflict will occur when they don’t get a passing grade or are required to actually do the work before the grade is given, and it’s the end of the term.

A friend of mine who is a superintendent has already had to deal with this exact situation. Not only did the parents expect their child to receive a passing grade, they expected the grade to be an “A” or “B.” The kicker to all of this, some of the parents demanding this passing grade even though the students didn’t do the work, were teachers.

This is an indictment of the system and the pervasiveness of the thinking surrounding the expectations of schools. Even our educators believe that the student simply shows up and put in their time they’ve met minimum requirements. – Steve Wyckoff

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