Google Sees Little Value in Test Scores and GPA

It must be reassuring to the folks who believe that school shouldn’t prepare students for the workplace to read the following written by Max Niesen from Business Insider:

In an interview with The New York Times' Adam Bryant, Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock explains that some of the biggest stalwarts of the hiring and recruiting world, the interview, GPA, and test scores, aren't nearly as important as people think.

Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found.

Bock has an excellent explanation about why those metrics don't mean much.

" Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment," he says.

While in school, people are trained to give specific answers, "it's much  more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer," Bock says. "You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer."

When I started teaching in the early 1990s, I had already worked for a bank, done some oil and gas properties management, and run different divisions of an automobile dealership.  My first teaching job at Robert E. Lee High School in San Antonio was a shock on many levels, but the biggest head-spinner was that it became clear to me that school had little to do with other workplaces or real life.  Some teachers were unmotivated and would have been fired in a week if school were anything like the working world.  I’ll never forget one seasoned teacher asking me why I worked so hard.  There was little focus on the customers, e.g. , the parents who paid our wages through taxes and the students who were the passive recipients of knowledge that was of little use in their lives.  A lot of time and energy was spent in managing the students’ days, making sure that everyone was accounted for and trying to limit the opportunities for students to engage in illicit or unsupervised activities.  Even amidst this mind-deadening, controlled world, there were many dedicated faculty and students who struggled to teach and learn in a system that really wasn’t conducive to helping students learn how to be successful in their lives outside of school.

The students who were successful at Robert E. Lee High School and most other high schools around the country, the students who learned how to “do school” and be successful in what Bock calls an “artificial environment,” went on to ply their school skills at college.  Then they faced what I and nearly everyone I knew faced when I graduated from college:  they faced a world of work that was quite different from high school and college.  While a college diploma may have given them a ticket into the workforce, it did little to prepare them for what they would be doing.

The most frustrating thing to me is that we know how to help students learn to be succesful outside of school.  We know how to teach students to examine and solve open-ended problems; we know how to instill grit in our students to give them long term perseverance; we know how to help students develop character strengths; we know how to create environments and methods that hone students’ communicative and collaborative skills; we know how to help internal motivation flourish within students; we know that we should limit curriculum to what is truly “lifeworthy.”  If you don’t believe me, pay attention to the experts who have spent the better part of their lives researching and reporting on these topics:  Check out Dan Meyer’s work in implementing problem solving, look at Angela Duckworth’s work on grit, read Martin Seligman on developing character, don’t forget Daniel Pink’s and Alfie Kohn’s books on motivation; listen to what Dave Perkins has to say about lifeworthy skills.

There are many things standing in the way of making school more relevant to life, but the primary obstacle is the collective mindset of institutions, parents, teachers, administrators, and students that we all think we know what school looks like.  In our minds, even though many of us know better, school should look like what it looked like last year, or ten years ago, or fifty years ago simply because that is school.  Unfortunately, the school that we are comfortable with, the school of our memory, grows in irrelevance as the rest of the world speeds toward the future while we remain firmly planted in the past.

Modeling: Another MOOC Course

I’ve been doing a little modeling on the side the last few weeks.  No photo shoots for Esquire or GQ, but modeling -- as in creating ways to represent the world by using math or graphics to gain understanding and find solutions to problems.  I enrolled in my second MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) through Coursera a couple of weeks ago and have gone through the first three weeks of Dr. Scott E. Page’s “Model Thinking” class at the University of Michigan.  It already has me thinking that modeling, along with probability and statistics, should be required at all schools.

If you have been listening to the news lately, you are probably aware of the growing demonstrations in Sao Paulo, where Brazilians are protesting against high taxes and low living standards.  Dr. Page’s lecture that I watched yesterday demonstated a simple model that explains how difficult it is to predict these huge public demonstrations that have occurred around the world the last three years.  It all has to do with thresholds and peer effects.  I’ll let him explain it in this six-minute video:

This simple model has some pretty big implications for seventh-graders.  We know that as children grow to be teens that most look to peers for cues on what they should wear, how they should act, what music to listen to, the type of social media to use, etc.  What is a particular thirteen-year-old's threshold for "trying on a new hat" and what if that new hat is not something harmless, but something that can have lasting ramifications.  I plan to show this video to my advisory next year in hopes that  understanding thresholds and the peer effect may give my boys enough knowledge to display courage and confidence in situations that could be harmful or dangerous.  

Free Your Mind, Share a Run

They say that if you sleep on a problem that you will wake up with a solution.   I solve problems when I run.  Creativity happens because I am unencumbered by linear thought.  My mind floats and roams on a rocking sea, held afloat by the the constant rhythm of my feet, my breath, and my arms.  When running, I have true attention deficit, and my mind leaps and frolics in places that it normally doesn’t venture.  Because of this, I rarely run with others.  The conversation keeps my mind too focused to float.  However, on the last day of the faculty workweek, Andy Lammers and I hit a small portion of the Mountains to Sea Trail together, and something unusual happened -- at least for me.

After five minutes of panting up the Stuyvesant Road hill, we both fell into a comfortable rhythm of breath and legs.  The stressors of our work week started dripping off of us like the sweat that rolled down our backs.  After a few minutes, we began free associating childhood memories that were so close in spirit and emotion that our childhoods could have occurred in the same time and place instead of being separated by fifteen years and several thousand miles.  We talked about the risks that we took as boys:  throwing mudclods at our neighborhood friends, reading books soaked in the heroics of war, building forts, and pretty much being clueless to the world outside our neighborhoods.  Our memories fed off of each other, bouncing around from one thread to another.  It struck me much later that on this run, our minds worked together to do the same thing that happens to me when I run alone.  That is cool.  

Although I’ve known Andy for many years, that run brought me closer to him than any time we have spent together socially or professionally.  Long term memories have their neural grounding in deep emotion.  I’ll remember this run with Andy, and maybe in the future I’ll seek out running partners rather than shunning them.

Postive Psychology - A Summer Project

A few weeks ago, Missy Sullivan gave me an article to read about Positive Psychology written by Martin Seligman.  Missy has her headlights set on the completion of an advanced degree in School Psych, and during the summers we sometimes discuss ideas that apply to psychology and school.  I admit that I knew little to nothing about Positive Psychology, and although I found the article interesting, I was also a little skeptical.  In the meantime, I came across a large section in the book, How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, that described the theory and outcomes of Positive Psychology.  It seemed too much of a coincidence for me to be exposed to this theory twice in such a short period of time, so I’m following the serendipitous guidepost and delving into the theory, process, and outcomes.

The following is an excerpt from Martin Seligman’s Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being

First, a quiz:

Question one: in one or two words, what do you most want for your children?

If you are like the thousands of parents I’ve polled you responded, “Happiness,” “Confidence,” “Contentment,” “Fulfillment,” “Balance,” “Good stuff,” “Kindness,” “Health,” “Satisfaction,” “Love,” “Being civilized,” “Meaning,” and the like. In short, well-being is your topmost priority for your children.

Question two: in one or two words, what do schools teach?

If you are like other parents, you responded, “Achievement,” “Thinking skills,” “Success,” “Conformity,” “Literacy,” “Math,” “Work,” “Test taking,” “Discipline,” and the like. In short, what schools teach is how to succeed in the workplace.

Can and should schools attempt to teach well-being?  The list of adjectives that Seligman describes as what parents “most want for their children” seems pretty squishy.  Is it really our job in school to teach kids to “love each other” or to “find meaning?”  Truthfully, great teachers have always taught these skills and attitudes.  It is one of the things that promotes such strong bonds between teachers and students.  However, what if schools adopted systematic and coordinated approaches to teaching well-being?  This has been done and, according to Seligman, done with success.  

I’ve got some research to do this summer.

Revisiting Choi to the World

There are some Japanese words that just don't translate well into English, and natsukashi is one of them. To me, natsukashi is a gentle fondness of a memory that you know will never be repeated. One might feel natsukashi when remembering a perfect spring day walking next to the Matsukawa River with cherry blossoms drifting to the ground. This morning I woke up feeling a little natsukashi, remembering my family's time with Choi and his graduation from high school a year ago. So, I am reposting one of my favorite pieces, Choi to the World.

It will take me a few months to get over the absence of brilliant piano music as I prepare dinner in the evenings.  Choi is leaving us after nine months of inhabiting a room in our basement and our lives.  We are sad to see him go.  

Choi is a Korean national who graduated from Carolina Day School a few days ago.  He has attended CDS for three years, living with two other CDS families during the previous two years.  Among his many talents, Choi is a gifted linguist (fluent or proficient in five languages), an amazing pianist, an aspiring badminton player, a brilliant actor, an award-winning mathematician, a divergent thinker, and an encourager of vegetable eating for my seven-year-old.

I am sure that my sons get sick and tired of me asking them questions; it is simply a byproduct of my years as an educator, and I can’t help myself.  So this morning on the drive to school, I asked them what they learned from Choi over the last nine months.  John Kelly thought for a while (I give tons of wait time) and said simply that it was different having Choi live with us.  At first it seemed like a “duh” response, but John Kelly rarely gives simplistic reasons for anything.  After a few leading questions, what he was trying to say was that he learned a lot by being forced to live differently.  Our cozy family of four, with our routines and habits became different when Choi moved in last August.  Changing things up, making things different, is a prerequisite for growth and learning, and this was Choi’s greatest gift to our family.

My children also had first-hand experience living with someone from another country.  This will make them more accepting of others and other cultures for the rest of their lives.  Wow!   We had dinner table discussions about mandatory service in the military (following his freshman year at Dickinson College, Choi will serve in the Korean army for two years like all Korean males), we talked about gender roles and sexism in other countries, we listened to Korean pop wafting up from the basement, we learned that Korean children learn never to question their father (too bad I couldn’t get this going in my family).

Choi also provided inspiration to us all.  John Kelly composed his own piece of music for his recent piano recital because he observed Choi’s love of music.  Charlie learned some better table manners.  Elizabeth and I were reminded that the world is huge and that we can still take risks in our lives.

Last week, it hit Charlie that Choi would be leaving us for good.  He cried himself to sleep that night.  We will all miss Choi, but we send him out into the world with our love.  Choi to the World!

"The Road to Nowhere" and Finding the Right Fit

The “Nowhere” depicted in the film The Road to Nowhere does not refer to college as some may think; I believe “Nowhere” is the college application process.  The principal theme in the movie is that high school, for many students, is not about learning but about creating a resume full of exceptional grades, honors classes, AP courses, extracurricular efforts, community service, and various awards in order to gain acceptance to the highest-rated colleges possible.  Under our current system, students become experts at “doing school” rather than experts at learning skills and long-term knowledge.  This has to change, and there are many courageous schools that are fighting this battle to prepare students for life, not college acceptance.

In the Q and A session following a recent viewing of A Race to Nowhere, Warren Wilson College President, Steve Solnick, made some comments about the college selection process that rang true to me.  He said that the ranking of colleges by students and the ranking of students by colleges has created a situation where too many students end up at the wrong college.  Students should be choosing colleges by best fit, not by attempting to attend the “best” college.  Likewise, colleges should attempt to find students that best fit their college, not attempting to enroll the “best” students.

As Solnick pointed out, the strength of higher education in America comes from the great diversity of colleges.  There are colleges that train students to be athletes, that conduct research, that emphasize particular religious beliefs, that promote outdoor education, that focus on relationships between faculty and students, that require all students to spend a year abroad, etc.  Choosing a college because it outranks another on an arbitrary list inevitably ends up with students at the wrong schools.  

One indicator that students are choosing the wrong colleges is that one-third of all college students end up transferring (Chronicle of Higher Learning).   Of course there are other reasons for transferring than discovering that your “best college” choice in high school was a poor fit, but certainly the lack of fit must be a determining factor for many students who transfer.

Unfortunately buying a seat at a college is under the same marketing and status influences as purchasing other goods and services.  Many Americans drive particular cars to impress others, choose wines because of a name or rating, and wear emblems on shirts and shoes because they are brand conscious.  So, it should come as no surprise that young Americans are susceptible to marketing ploys and status seeking with regards to college.  

This makes the job of conscientious parents and faculty even more important.  We must help our children and students to understand that college is much more than a name on a list and more than a flag that can be waved in front of the world to show how well they “did school."  When any young person says, “I want to go to college at _________,” the adults who love her need to ask why and probe deeply to help her discover the right fit.

On Relationships and Success

I come from a long line of salesmen, and all salesmen know that the best way to make a sale is to build a relationship.  My paternal grandfather spent the early part of his career buying mineral rights all over Texas, Oklahoma, and the South.  While the job could be viewed as buying something, my grandfather was actually selling the dream of riches to poor farmers during the 1920’s and 30’s.  I can imagine him driving the dusty, caliche roads, stopping every few miles to open the ranch gates that that crossed public highways then.  I feel certain that he kept a bottle of bourbon in his car to act as a lubricant to ensure the success of the negotiation.  My grandfather was successful because he could hold a conversation with anyone from the poorest dirt farmer to Lyndon Johnson.  

My maternal grandfather was a sales manager at a Buick dealership for most of his life until he mortgaged his house when he was in his sixties to buy the dealership.  He was also successful.  He knew almost everyone in San Antonio who might have the ability to buy a Buick over his sixty-year career.  He, too, knew how to ask questions and pay attention to the responses.  

While many probably thought that both my grandfathers had some charisma that made people want to do business with them, I don’t think that was the case.  I think they both recognized as young men that they could form relationships that were important to their business by listening.  My father knew this also, as one of the only pieces of advice that he ever gave me was that the key to success is listening.  It has taken me a long time to truly understand what he meant and that the success that he described was not necessarily financial.

I was having a casual chat with a parent today, and she told me that her daughter said that I must study information about students because I always ask them about things going on in their lives.  I admit that she is correct.  I do spend time asking students questions and remembering their answers.  Before the school year starts, I study photos of incoming sixth graders to make sure that I can place a name with a face.  It takes intention and purposeful actions to form and maintain relationships.  

I am rewarded every day with the success of having relationships with students and faculty.  The questions that I ask students and the comments that I make that appear to be casual sometimes take work.  They take the work of me getting out of my own brain and focusing my attention on someone else -- of attempting to see the world from a student’s twelve-year-old perspective, which is every bit as important as my fifty-four-year-old point of view.  I know that the success of these relationships will not show up in mineral rights or the gross profit made by selling a car; the success comes from knowing that my efforts help to create a place where young people can feel that someone is interested in them at a time in their lives when they sometimes feel vulnerable and alone.  

Resilience

Every spring, science teacher, Andy Lammers, requires his students to design, build, and launch rockets powered by water pressure that must deploy a parachute to land an egg so gently that the egg does not crack.  The project is one of several dozen project-based learning opportunities that our students encounter in middle school.  A couple of weeks ago, I asked one of our eighth graders how his water-bottle-rocket launch went.  His casual, matter-of-fact reply, “not very good, but it was only our first launch,” may seem less than momentous, but, truly, those words are a distillation of a mindset and attitude that we we are purposefully instilling in our students.  Teaching our students to be resilient,  to overcome setbacks and know that some level of success will ultimately be achieved, is one of our most important tasks.

It is self-evident that for students to overcome obstacles, they must encounter obstacles at school -- and the obstacles that they encounter must be real, valid, and purposeful.  Also, the obstacles must be stiff enough to create cognitive dissonance, but they also must be ones that can be scrambled over, pushed aside, or blown up.  In many schools, some students experience academic obstacles every day that are too huge to even attempt to conquer, and then some students rarely experience even the smallest setbacks.  Differentiating to provide learning opportunities that challenge each student at a level where success can be achieved through perseverance is not too difficult, but it takes a recognition that developing resilience can be a more important goal than learning subject content.  If teachers plan lessons believing that the foremost goal is for students to learn resilience and the secondary goal is to learn subject matter, then the methods employed will be different.  Project-based learning, Paideia seminars, and writing workshops are examples of methodology that offer opportunity for all students to be challenged, while still learning content and skills.

Students must also be given the opportunity to improve or change in order to develop resilience.  To accomplish this, there must be chances for the student and others (peers, faculty, friends, family) to observe trials and attempts, and there must be the opportunity for do-overs.  To be most effective, there should be no stigma against failing other than the recognition that the student needs to improve and the recognition of ways that the student can improve.  When true formative assessment becomes institutionalized, it changes the entire dynamic of a school community.  Schools become focused on learning, not “playing school” to achieve grades and other clumsy attempts to quantify learning.

I have referred to the words written on the whiteboard in my office several times in my writings:  reflection is the key to change.  While reflection is somewhat inherent in all formative assessment, it needs to be given a bigger role.  Students need to be required to analyze and make judgements about their attempts and struggles either in writing, discussions, videos, drawings, or charts.  They should do this both individually and with others, formally and informally.  They should observe what others have done so they can apply learned techniques to their attempts, but they should also be encouraged to try new, inventive ways to solve problems and express themselves.  This freedom to be creative and innovative can be institutionalized when divergent thinking is recognized and rewarded.

“Not very good, but it was only our first launch.”  What if we could teach every child in this country to have the attitude inherent in this statement -- to know that immediate setbacks will be overcome, to find problems and look for solutions, to aim for long term success, and to know that it will take work and struggle to achieve something worthwhile?  

Seeing the Unseen

photo by Elizabeth Douglas

This winter as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway on the way to school, my boys and I would sometimes attempt to spot wildlife.  Winter isn’t a very good time to see animals in the mountains of Western North Carolina, but we persisted and were occasionally rewarded with a glimpse of the odd squirrel or crow.  I wonder what we would have seen had we parked the car and walked that five mile stretch on the Mountains to Sea Trail that parallels the Parkway?  Or, what would we have seen if we just wandered through the woods, off the road and off the trail, through the leafless blackberry brambles and among the dark green rhododendron, peering around the gray trunks splotched with white?  Would we have seen more wildlife?  Would we have seen something unexpected that might have created some new synapses in our brains that would cause us to view the world in a slightly different manner?

Students need to get off the road and off the trail.  Most schools are all too predictable.  Our daily schedules with learning boxed up nicely into particular disciplines make it all too easy for students to pass through their education without really looking beyond three feet on either side of the road.  

We know that today’s students face an unpredictable future where they will bounce from job to job, perhaps holding as many as ten or fifteen different jobs during a lifetime.  Futurists claim that by 2025 over half the jobs that our current students will compete for don’t even exist today.  In order to thrive in this world, our students need to have an adventurous spirit; their thinking needs to be nimble and adaptable to new and changing conditions; their minds need to be trained in a way that frees them to take mental risks.   

We are creating a school that supports this type of learning and thinking.  The faculty in the Middle School at Carolina Day School is constantly working to provide experiences for our students to develop a mindset that forces them to see things that others don’t, not necessarily because they have better vision, but because our students relish the opportunity to walk off the trail and know how to seek and value the unseen.

Learn to Program - Starting with Scratch and Minecraft

Last week, my sixth-grade son and his classmates were asked by their science teacher to design a program in Scratch (a beginning programming language developed by MIT) that depicted the water cycle. When he was in the fourth grade, I introduced my son to Scratch, and he has played around with it occasionally over the past two years. He and his classmates had fun with the project, and even those who were totally unfamiliar with it learned some basics of programming.

Yesterday, my son downloaded a new "protocol" into Minecraft. Like many boys his age, Minecraft has become the first thing that he turns to on the weekends.  Along with playing on Minecraft with other folks, my son is in the process of creating his own city that is really pretty complex.  While he was engaged in his city planning, I asked him if he had been able to transfer any skills from his extensive Minecraft experience to Scratch.   Here is his off-the-top-of-his-head response, without looking up from his laptop:

• 3-D modeling
• coordinate grids 
• I can go in and change the code a little to make it do what I want. 

I don’t think anyone would consider my son a computer geek.  He plays sports after school; he practices piano; he has sleep-overs with friends, he reads the Sunday comics; he occasionally washes his mom's car; he eats constantly; and he programs a little.  In the future, my son may decide to study and learn more sophisticated programming, or he may not. The important thing is that he knows that he can, and coding is not some mysterious operation that only geniuses can accomplish. He can do it; anyone can do it; everyone should.

 

Boys and Reading

I used to listen to NPR on the twenty-minute ride into school every morning.  Now, the minivan speeds along in total silence as my sixth and second-grade sons read in the back seat.  I feel lucky that both my boys love to read, but I think there is more to it than luck.

I know that I do a lot wrong as a father of two boys.  I feel a little guilty about not teaching my oldest son how to throw a perfect spiral and about using a little too much sarcasm at the dinner table, but I do feel pretty good about encouraging them to love reading.  Since they were babies, I have been an active reader to my boys, and now that they are older, we read together almost every night.  It has become our time together to relax in the evening.  For the last year, we have been reading classics almost exclusively.  Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, King Arthur, and Sherlock Holmes have been our evening fare, and we all look forward to this time whether it is fifteen minutes or an hour.  

I have been amazed at how my eight-year-old can pick up the general plot lines of a Sherlock Holmes story.  He has learned to keep his questions to a minimum and attempt to figure out the vocabulary and complex mysteries on his own.  A couple of weeks ago, we had an extended conversation about why Sherlock would want to take a seven-percent solution of cocaine as a remedy to boredom.  Last night, they learned a little about the KKK as we finished “The Five Orange Pips.”

Reading together also gives us a common experience and vocabulary.  As my oldest son gets deeper into the middle school years and seeks more privacy, I know that I will always have something to talk with him about.  When we have difficulty expressing our emotions to each other, we still get to share a part of our lives every night.  I hope that this bond will be something that he can count on when the world goes topsy-turvy.

I know that lots of dads find this same connection with their sons through sports, and I’m certainly not knocking that time together.  I’m sure that I could learn something about parenting from them.  But when the backseat is quiet in the mornings, I continue to smile to myself knowing that my sons are imagining themselves in a world far removed from the traffic of Interstate 40.

Shadow Testing

I spend way too much time thinking about standardized testing.  Part of the reason why is because the state administered End of Grade tests became a large part of my life when I worked at a local public middle school.  During my last few years working in this school, I witnessed curricular decisions, faculty management decisions, programming decisions, professional development decisions, resource decisions, and scheduling decisions that were made only to optimize performance on the End of Grade tests -- principally the math and language arts tests which were the only EOGs given at that time.  To some degree, students ceased to be students and became percentages within categories.  I do not fault the dedicated teachers or administrators who made these decisions; they were simply playing by the rules that had been placed upon them.  However, I chose not to play by those rules any more.

I really want to see value in standardized achievement tests.  I want to look at them as the great equalizer -- objective, egalitarian instruments that don’t care if you are one percenter or on welfare.  I want them to be the provider of opportunity and the leveler of the playing field.  The problem is that in their effort to be objective, the tests must ignore the most valuable parts of being human.  They must measure things that are measurable, when, in fact, this treats our children as one-dimensional shadows and ignores their humanity.

For years I have read articles and had people tell me what standardized tests measure.  I’m not sure whether to believe them or not, but I do know what they don’t measure.  They don’t measure the most important qualities and skills that we should value in our young people. They don’t measure someone’s ability to create -- to make something of value that hasn’t been thought of or done before.  They don’t measure a persons ability to solve a novel problem by working with others.  They don’t measure the ability to form and maintain relationships.   They don’t measure a person’s ability to reflect on and evaluate their own place in the world.  They don’t measure a person’s honesty and integrity.  They don’t measure physical abilities.  They don’t measure how a child interacts with the natural world.  They don’t measure if someone can express emotion and feeling through the visual and performing arts.  They don’t measure a child’s happiness.  Truthfully, they only measure a very small part of a person, yet we have built our country’s education system as a response to these tests.  How can we look at a child in such narrow terms and think we are doing the best for her?

Exploring Artificial Intelligence

These two videos are resources from the fourth week of the MOOC Course, ELearning and Digital Cultures. They portray artificial intelligence in humanistic terms. Other than being entertaining, thinking about the videos has stretched and pushed my vision of what  interactions between humans and machines may look like.

In terms of education, it makes me believe that we need to extend the dialogue that we have with students beyond just the best ways to use technology and explore the moral implications of how we interact with technology.  Starting those discussions today with students is a wise thing, and I believe that students will be very engaged in the conversation.

I really hope that you will take the time to watch these.  They each take around eight minutes, but they are entertaining and provocative.

Who Knows the Question?

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers. -- Voltaire

Our society loves clever kids.  We hold spelling and geography bees, lauding those whippersnappers who memorize and spit back the facts.  When a high school student scores a perfect 2400 on the SAT, we marvel at this amazing feat and the college doors that will be blown off the hinges by such prowess.  On a daily basis, teachers call on students with hands held high and give them a big smile or maybe even a Jolly Rancher if they answer correctly.  Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t appreciate these children and young adults who are exceedingly good at memorizing and maybe even applying some knowledge, but I think that we are really looking at the wrong end of the equation.  What we should be focusing on is teaching students how to ask the questions -- good questions.  That is a skill that will transcend knowing the capital of Botswana or even knowing how to spell “daiquiri.”

I love to hear adults tell kids, “Now, that’s a really good question.”  Is it a good question because the answer is not obvious?  Or, is it a good question because the answer is complex and may vary with circumstances or conditions?  Or, is it a good question because it demonstrates that the child understands enough about something to ask the right question that will get to the root of the problem.  Or, is it a good question because no one has yet found the answer?

It is not difficult to teach students to ask good questions, but too often we are intent on asking the questions themselves to get “right” answer.  I remember years ago attempting to get my students to write “good questions” after reading chapters in a novel.  Initially, they were terrible at asking meaningful questions simply because they had rarely been asked to do it.  But as the year progressed, they improved dramatically as we continued to discuss the meaning of “good questions,” and as we modeled good questions for each other.  It was freeing for the students not to have to remember inane details in the text to prove that they had read chapters 4 and 5.  Their questions showed that they had read and understood deep and sometimes subtle aspects of the story.

Of course the big problem for many schools and students is that the BIG TEST does not care about questioning.  I would love to see a big stakes assessment give students a picture, story, or scenario and tell students -- “After reading this passage or viewing this picture, ask a question about it and then explain the importance or significance of your question.”  Wow, that sure would be hard for the folks at ETS to score. I guess that's the problem . . . in order for this scenario to play out, we need to acknowledge that there is much more to school than answering someone else's questions.

All Things Piratical

photo by Tanja Mamas

One of the best things about being a faculty member is that I sometimes get to learn from and with our students.  This occurred recently when I was asked to become a member of the pirate chorus in our middle school musical, The Pirates of Penzance, Jr.  As a student, I shunned any opportunities to be on stage.  Like many young people, I was terrified of appearing foolish to my peers.  Over the years, I conquered those fears and often relish the irony of being the assistant principal who does goofy things like disco dancing in the hallways, so I was excited to join the fun.  

I have had a couple of brief cameos in past plays, and I expected my pirate part to be a quick wave and laugh.  However, I attended my first practice a couple of weeks before the performance date and was startled to find that I actually had to sing and act in several numbers.  While I am egocentric enough to be in our middle school play, I’m not quite so needy as to have to recount my struggles learning lines or figuring out drama jargon.  I will simply say that I spent a lot of time working on the play over the past several weeks, and my wife and kids are grateful not to have to listen to “A Rollicking Band Of Pirates We” in the car anymore.

I had always known that working on the play was a special thing for the students involved, but I never really realized how special.  After a couple of weeks of practices, a dress rehearsal, and an actual performance, I felt like I was accepted as just another one of the actors.  The students and I joked together, chatted at times when we should have been listening to direction, sang the silly warm-up riffs, drank imaginary “pirate sherry,”  put on lipstick, and stood side-by-side on the stage.  A student and I got to take a few swings at each other in a fight scene, and he had a blast pretending to pummel me.  (I think he may have taken a little too much joy in this).  

From being a regular cast member, I got to understand the team spirit involved in the production.  I have heard all about egos and prima donnas in acting circles, but there was none of that happening on our set.  The tech crew, actors, directors, costumers, and make-up “moms” all supported the primary mission, and all worked together to put on the best play possible.  What is so amazing to me is that everyone knew their respective parts so well that the play would have been a success without any adults present during the performance.  This is not to discount the wonderful direction of Mandy Bean and Beth Heinberg, the costume work of Susan Mycroft, or the talents of tech master, Mike Congleton, but rather to extol their great leadership by bringing a group of middle school students and a bumbling administrator to a place of independence and competence.

This play is a brilliant microcosm of the skills we value in our middle school.  While there may be some external motivation like applause, the students’ participation as a member of the crew or cast is voluntary.  Most of the students like it because it involves them in something that is much bigger than themselves.  We challenge our students to get involved, to form relationships, to achieve something of value, and to gain confidence and strength of character.  It is difficult for me think of a better venue for them to practice and gain these attributes.

I received a professional and personal gift this year by being allowed to become a student in my own school.  If anything, my involvement with Pirates of Penzance, Jr. raised my respect for what we accomplish on a daily basis within our community.  And, yes, Elizabeth, I will shave off my scrubby beard!

Gain Control

In the second week of the ECCMOOC course, ELearning and Digital Cultures, we have been asked to explore the future of digital technology.  The first two videos on the resources page are ads by large corporations, Corning and Microsoft, that show how they believe their products will integrate into our future lives.




These videos emphasize the need for a different type of education, one that embraces technology and prepares students to use and interact with technology with ease.  We want our students to understand technology well enough so that they can use it to better their lives and the lives of others.

I frequently tell parents and students, technology is a tool, but it is a seductive tool.  We have to recognize when technology is changing the way that we live our lives and interact with others, and make conscious decisions how we use it.  One of the biggest faults for most of us is that we have become users of technology without making conscious decisions on the impact of that use.  While some say that the ability to conduct a search online will be the most useful skill for our current students, I would argue that being able to decide when and how to use technology will be an even more important skill.

As I was driving into work this morning, I heard an interview with an MIT professor who is concerned with the effect that technology is having on relationships. She thinks that sending texts and email makes it easy for us to disconnect from important relationships without having to face the consequences of the disconnection.  Concepts like this are what our students need to be discussing and understanding, so that they can actually understand the consequences of their use of technology -- the pluses and minuses -- before they make the choice to use it.

For those seeking some good advice on how to make technology work for us without gaining control over us, I recommend the last few chapters Clay Johnson's book, The Information Diet.  Johnson gives some practical ideas on how we can become "conscious consumers" of media and users of technology.

Dystopian or Utopian: Two Films

Part of the content of this MOOC course is to look at some films and try to decide if and how they represent a utopian or dystopian view.  There are four videos listed as resources.  The first one, Inbox, is about a two young adults trying to find a meaningful relationship.


To me, the use of the bags show that the mystery involved in human relationships can't be replaced by technology.  At about 1:48 into the film, the woman logs into her gmail account and seems to be bored with communicating by technology, almost immediately closing the laptop.  She then begins her bag relationship with the young man which defies the conventions of normal life.  Perhaps the director is telling us the there is something about human relationships that can't be defined, something weird, crazy, and magical.

The other video that I'm putting up was not one of the resources within the course, but it was shared in a tweet by one of the other students in the course.  The message is a lot simpler to decipher, but it is also clever and powerful.