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Transforming Education in the US: Advice for President Obama
I went to a well-attended event in Boston, The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009: Impact & Opportunity in the Obama Plan, with an illustrious panel who completely blew the most interesting question they were asked: If you were the new US Secretary of Health and Human Services, what is the first thing you would say to President Obama?
Let’s ask the same question about education. I formulated my own panel of experts, posed the question, “If you are the new Secretary of Education, what is the first thing you would tell President Obama?”, and here’s what they said:
Jay Cross: Mr. President, primary and secondary education in our nation are broken. They are not preparing our citizens to live in the modern world. Primary schools shield children from communities and real life, walling them off from the subjects we want them to master. And as Bill Gates said, “All of the evidence indicates that our high schools are no longer a path to opportunity and success, but a barrier to both.” Our great country has one of the lowest rates of high school graduation in the industrialized world.
Our nation’s schools need to be re-thought, re-designed, and re-engineered from the ground up. We probably need to change them from being our many counties’ schools, held back by the drag of parochialism, into a coherent, more unified arrangement. This takes fire in the belly. I am instructing every member of the Department of Education to read John Taylor Gattos’s Dumbing Us Down and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.
Sir, you might put them on your reading stack, too. If schools are not preparing the citizenry to lead fulfilling, meaningful lives — to be all that they can be — what are they for?
The staff here is already working to undo the damage done by the absurd focus on testing and other bad baggage from the No Child Left Behind mess we inherited from the W regime.
Curt Bonk: I second Jay’s notion of reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars. 1970). Add to that Charles Wedemeyer’s Learning at the Back Door: Reflections on Non-traditional Learning in the Lifespan (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1981) and Seymou Papert’s Mindstorms.
Karl Kapp: President Obama, while I applaud your focus on “green” energy and job creation, these measures are being put into place only to address symptoms of a deeper and more pervasive problem. The problem is that our educational institutions are out-of-date with the realities of today’s world. They have failed us by creating MBA students more focused on personal gain than the good of the country, they have failed us in keeping competitive in the world, they have failed us in creating organizations that are adaptive to change, they have failed us in preparing our students for the future.
Our current classroom-based teaching institutions are modeled after the traditional university structure which was appropriate 100 years ago but is inadequate for children who are carrying around cell phones more powerful than the super computers of only a few decades ago.
While in some cases, in class delivery methods have been “updated” with PowerPoint, animations and videos, the primary model for instructional delivery in elementary, grade and university level is lecture-driven with the instructor holding all the knowledge which he or she delivers to the students.
The seemingly universal instructional development model is one in which faculty members develop and deliver instruction they believe would be appropriate and of interest to their students with little input from outside voices – the employers who hire the graduates or the next level of school that further educates the students. Little effort is made to follow up on the outcomes of the instruction. No one knows if one degree from a particular college is better than another. There are no objective criteria except for price and the next bubble is the University and College cost bubble. I predict it will break within the next 5 years. The current cost structure and pedagogical models are unsustainable.
New models are needed – ones that focuses on measurable academic goals and targets a specific outcomes, encourages creativity, innovative thinking and appropriate application of technology. The new models must rethink the face-to-face classroom instruction and, instead, turn learning into a life long process.
Allison Rossett: So glad that you asked my opinion, President Obama. I’ve been wanting to speak to you, and here is my opportunity. Do please write back. I’ll watch for it.
I am just back from Singapore. What I saw influences my thoughts. No, they are not deschooling or making learning particularly more authentic or even using all that much technology. What they are doing is being very, very clear about what is expected and measuring the heck out of their students in light of those outcomes. Then feedback, then options linked to performance.
I can hear my colleagues squealing. Sounds like test, tests and more tests. Have you lost your mind, Rossett? Don’t you want students to be free to pursue their interests and creativity?
I do. I favor independence, problems, authenticity, projects, and collaboration as the heart of instruction. I wish we could deliver that to all students and that they would nutritiously and consistently partake of such a feast.
But it is not working well, not here, not now, not for many youth I see here in California. Jay Cross mentioned drop outs, just to point to one indicator.
I think we must invest in national standards and matching tests. Let the fight begin over how those assessments would look and what outcomes they would treasure. There would be disagreements about dead white male literature, memorization or aided performance, reading vs drama, one language vs many and so on and so forth.
While I don’t care for bubble tests and weeks devoted to testing, I do know that we all work better when we have transparency about what is being achieved – and what is not. That means tests that are reliably interpreted by teachers, principals, parents, and taxpayers.
I do favor education that slowly increases freedom, choices and independence, over time, as skills and knowledge are acquired. If you don’t read or write well or plan well or work well with a team, just how good are you going to be at problem based learning? Well, the group might “validate” you and the teacher might smile, but you know you have problems and you would rather be anywhere than where you are experiencing doubts about your competence.
That’s it, Mr. President. Great universal tests and perhaps linked tutorials to prep students for success.
It’s not smaller classrooms or even more money, not right off the bat. Let’s start with establishing a shared definition of success at all levels, with room for local priorities and differences. Then we can talk about class size, technology, and money, yes, even incentives for teachers.
Mark Notess; Mr. President, I would like to offer a small but significant recommendation. Last year, the new post-9/11 GI Bill was passed and will fully take effect later this year. One provision of that bill prohibits payment of living stipends to veterans enrolled in wholly online programs. The notion that online or even correspondence study is inferior or requires less work is antiquated. The technology of instruction says little about its quality or the amount of work required. The Department of Education can identify standards of higher education, such as accreditation by reputable accreditation bodies, which will better serve to indicate true full-time study and the need for living stipends than does mode of instruction. Please work to amend the Bill, removing the penalty for fully online study.
Engendering Industrial Participation in e-Learning: A Summary from the 7th European Conference on e-Learning
A client recently asked for advice about e-learning conferences to attend. As I thought about which to recommend, I was struck by the abundance of conferences and how each seems to have a different orientation. I like to keep up with which are taking place where, even if I am not am submitting or presenting. But it is hard to know much about what takes place when you aren’t there. Conferences are largely experiential; if you aren’t there, the primary artifact is the conference proceedings, supplemented occasionally by blogs, tweets, videos, and photographs. Sometimes people write conference reports, which can be a useful way to learn about one person’s perspective on the highlights of the conference.
The 7th European Conference on e-Learning was held in November, 2008 in Cyprus. The chair, George Papadopoulos, posted a summary. He had solicited what the gaps are in e-Learning research, and the most interesting response, I thought, was:
how to engender industrial participation in e-Learning – it was felt that industry does not have time to research the benefits or otherwise of systems. Businesses are influenced by vendors and not what is said by academics at a conference. It is difficult to bring people from industry to present cases.
When I worked in the training world, not only were few people writing or presenting case studies, but there was little reflection about anything that took place. If I worked on a training project for a client, the focus was on finding the next project. Not only did inhibit reflection, but there was little focus on reuse of processes or knowledge gained. Internal training projects similarly had no post-mortem. Not only was there no discussion or reflection, but many projects included devising post-session evaluations, which I thought often allowed for little constructive criticism on the part of participants. I agree that this is a gap in e-Learning research and one that is unlikely to change without partnerships between industry and academia. The current economic situation may worsen the situation since people will be scrambling even harder to find and start the next project.
One last point that I was struck by in George’s summary: he commented that there little coverage of m-Learning at the conference. (In the age of the iPhone and other mobile devices, does m-learning actually exist any more as a separate category?)
I will conclude this by saying that selecting a conference is based on many factors, including location. Cyprus looks like a beautiful conference setting.
Letters to Lisa
Miss Manners and Ann Landers have long been my favorite syndicated advice columnists. I was a tutor at Miss Manners’ son’s Harvard house and met her at his graduation. She wore a hat and gloves and was charming when I, alone of all the tutors who noticed her, approached her to say I was a huge fan and to ask if and when one removes a hat and gloves at a graduation ceremony. I like advice columns, in general, and I decided to write my own today because I received a question from a friend that many people have asked me before, especially of late.
Dear Lisa,
Since my instructional design position at X was eliminated, I’m job hunting. I’d appreciate a chance to brainstorm with you about my interests, my presentation, and leads.
Signed,
J.C.
Dear J.C.,
I’m sorry to hear about your position. Since this is a tough time to be job hunting, the best thing to do is to develop shorter and longer term strategies. For the latter, it may be a great time to go back to school, whether online or in the classroom. Do you have unexplored or dormant talents, interests, or dreams? You never know where they might take you. Look at me: if someone had told me even ten years ago I’d be teaching in a medical school, I would have laughed, but I’ve never had more professional satisfaction.
The obvious short term strategy is networking. I recommend giving a talk or writing a paper about an area of expertise and letting (or hoping) people come to you because of what you know. If the topic is instructional design, don’t just present or publish in e-learning circles but also consider verticals. (This was advice Margaret Driscoll gave me. Oh, no, does she have an advice column too?) In this way you can get attention from people who may know nothing about your topic and will learn just enough to know that they need you.
Finally, lots of people come up to me when I give talks or email me after reading something I write and ask about jobs. Come up with a great way of presenting yourself. (I noticed that you mentioned presentation in your letter.) I will never forget the guy who asked me about jobs – at least I think that was what he mumbled – and then took 3 minutes to locate his home-printed business card. And this was after I had given an evening talk and just wanted to get home. I went to a fantastic seminar Ilise Benum gave about elevator pitches. Practice in front of the mirror and then ask your friends to critique you.
Good luck and let me know if my advice helps,
Lisa
Ten Most Read Articles in eLearn Magazine in 2008
Don’t laugh, but I heard the list of the top ten television personalities for 2008 on the radio and found myself listening with bated breath – and I don’t even watch television! When I received eLearn Magazine’s stats for 2008, I felt a similar heightened sense of anticipation. I won’t make you wait for a drum roll, but will just list our ten most read articles here (not surprisingly, our home page had the most hits).
1) Michelle Everson’s Group Discussion in Online Statistics Courses
2) Michael Feldstein and I wrote up work we had done for a consulting project in Designing Usable, Self-Paced e-Learning Courses: A Practical Guide
3) Roger Schank’s The Story-Centered Curriculum
4) Laurie Rowell’s feature article Can the “$100 Laptop” Change the World?
5) Eric Sauve’s Communities of Practice: Addressing Workforce Trends Through New Learning Models
6) One of my opinion columns, My Life as a Wikipedian
7 and 8) My interviews of Elliott Masie and Rich Mayer
9) Jay Cross, Tony O’Driscoll,and Eilif Trondsen wrote Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning
10) Karl Kapp’s review of Jane Bozarth’s E-learning Solutions on a Shoestring
Honorable mention goes to Clare Gill’s Confessions of a Neophyte Distance Learner and Full-Time Procrastinator and Stephen Downes’ Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do…
Just behind that, inexplicably, was Predictions for 2007, which was slightly more popular than Predictions for 2008. Of course, the new Predictions for 2009 wasn’t even out.
Next is the analysis: what does this tell me about what eLearn Magazine readers want more of? Help me out and tell me how we can best help you.