{"id":721,"date":"2013-05-30T14:19:19","date_gmt":"2013-05-30T21:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=721"},"modified":"2013-05-30T14:28:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-30T21:28:53","slug":"to-make-students-learn-make-schools-smart-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=721","title":{"rendered":"To Make Students Learn, Make Schools Smart First"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I learned a thing or three on last Friday, and it\u2019s taken me a week to digest it all.\u00a0 For reasons unknown, I was invited to meet with some very bright teachers who are advisors to the California Council of Science and Technology, the state analogue to the prestigious National Science Academy.<\/p>\n

The CCST has been wrestling with what to do about digital education, and the invited group of teachers, tech developers, and onlookers spent Friday exploring the efficacy of new modes of learning.<\/p>\n

Although I was invited to talk (mostly I introduced a policy paper<\/a> <\/strong>on technology just released by Policy Analysis for California Education), for most of the day I listened intently to the participants as they described how they used technology in their work and what those experiences were teaching them.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s what I learned: Teachers and tech developers learn the most when there is rapid, reliable feedback about the efficacy of teaching and learning.\u00a0 This observation crosses platform and technology: new tech, old tech, or no tech.\u00a0 When the learning system builds in feedback, learners are better able to correct their mistakes and teachers are more effective in managing the learning process.<\/p>\n

Feedback wasn\u2019t the topic of any speech or panel, but its importance kept inserting itself into the conversation.\u00a0 Mohammad Qayoumi, the president of San Jose State University who has been leading the charge toward online learning, talked about the finely grained data that is being generated by students taking remedial or gateway courses.\u00a0 I had been skeptical (and remain so somewhat) about the efficacy of MOOCs (massive open online courses) to successfully teach students who were having learning problems in the first place.\u00a0 But Qayoumi\u2019s story was one of how the course developers tracked student progress and modified lessons when students got stuck.<\/p>\n

The theme was echoed by Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, who talked about being able to track student progress keystroke by keystroke, better understanding how students approached problems and where large numbers of them got wrong answers.\u00a0 \u201cWhen 2,000 students pick the same wrong answer on a quiz, you know that there is something wrong with how information is being presented,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n

Teachers in the room talked about students learning how to collaborate online.\u00a0 The connected environment allowed much greater peer feedback and seemed to be helping conventional knowledge acquisition as well as collaborative. \u00a0Others saw a merging of instruction, big data, and cognitive psychology.<\/p>\n

But turning information into useful feedback is not automatic.\u00a0 Many of the teachers talked about mundane access problems and school district policies that concentrated on acquiring devices rather than understanding what to do with them.\u00a0 Historically, school districts have responded to changes in educational technology by buying devices or bandwidth.\u00a0 Lots of computers or tablets make districts look modern, but they don\u2019t necessarily change teaching and learning.<\/p>\n

In reality, building in feedback to teaching with digital technology is just a specific case of the organizational design problem that schools should be dealing with all the time.\u00a0 Making organizations smart, capable of continuous improvement, requires a constant flow of information and reaction to it.\u00a0 This is true for student lessons, teacher performance, and school operations.<\/p>\n

Long before Internet-fueled education became the topic of the day, schools got smarter by having student study teams where groups of adults examined student work, data teams of teachers examining results across classrooms, learning walks where teachers visited one another\u2019s classrooms, and student peer evaluation groups.\u00a0 Professional development was aimed at analysis rather than prescription.<\/p>\n

These traditional ways of making schools into more productive organizations require managing human resources: creating time in the school day and space to meet, building routines for inspection and analysis of information.\u00a0 Adding computers and the Internet to the process doesn\u2019t replace the need to get the design of the school day or teacher work right.\u00a0 It makes it more important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I learned a thing or three on last Friday, and it\u2019s taken me a week to digest it all.\u00a0 For reasons unknown, I was invited to meet with some very bright teachers who are advisors to the California Council of Science and Technology, the state analogue to the prestigious National Science Academy. The CCST has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,8,98],"tags":[137,138,139,141,140],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":725,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}