Availability in the digital teaching world

Let's start with a true confession: I'm addicted to digital media. Email, Twitter, texting, Facebook, Instagram--I compulsively check them all. 

But during the summer, it's just for me and it's just for fun. But during the school year, it's a different story. Email used to be the only digital portal for student communication. But now Twitter is too. And last year, my students figured out that if they want a fast response, Twitter was the way to go. And I would be tweeting back at 11 pm. Which is a problem.

I'd like to train my freshmen to be pro-active with the help they need, and, more, I'd like to draw a boundary between my work and my life. But how to go about this on my end of things? Defeat my digital addiction (which may or may not be a good thing for my overall well being), or try to limit my responses to work-related items? In this 24 hour digital world, what is the line between work and home lives? As a teacher, it feels like this is getting blurrier and blurrier, and I'm not sure how to best address it...

But I'm open to suggestions...maybe you could tweet them to me...?

Putin's figured out the "new" game

What we are witnessing in Ukraine is the first in what will be a series of moves made by aggressive, avaricious nation-states in the coming decades, and indeed, could become the new norm for conflict escalation around the world, unless the Obama administration develops some new tools for response in a hurry.

Since the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, European states bought into the notion of sovereignty, or being free from outside interference in their domestic affairs, or the affairs of their nation of peoples. Thus the nation-state was born.  Europeans then carried this notion out into the world with them over subsequent centuries; wars were fought between and among nation-states, not individuals, not groups and not nations.  On the basis of this fundamental understanding, conflict happened, treaties were negotiated, goods and services were exchanged, and we eventually saw that the majority of international relations were conducted at the nation-state level.

Throughout the 20th Century, what we saw, and what Putin has neatly circumvented in Ukraine, was the idea that aggression comes from one nation-state to another. This occurred, it has been argued by many, in a largely anarchic society of nation-states who were concerned ultimately with self-interest.  As a result, nation-states, like the US, became guarantors of sovereignty for themselves first (and those nation-states who were their allies second) on the basis of military strength. This strength was measured by the ability to deter or defeat another nation-state's military. As a result, nation-states acted in response to other nation-states.  But in the 21st Century, when the aggressor isn't a nation-state, the options for military response is effectively muted.

This is Putin's tactically brilliant maneuver.  Ukraine's sovereignty is certainly being assailed by members of the Russian nation, but Ukraine is not being directly assaulted by the Russian nation-state.  This makes a definitive, protective, military response by those nation-states who would support Ukrainian sovereignty (or the idea of sovereignty in general) impossible, for against whom can they direct their military efforts? Putin's plausible deniability is clearly a sham, but it is thick enough that no nation-state can act militarily against his nation-state, while members of the Russian nation begin to systematically dismantle Ukrainian sovereignty, first in Crimea, and now in the eastern part of Ukraine. Ultimately the Russian nation-state will benefit from the influx of natural gas, warm water ports and other resources and will pay little to no military cost for these gains. Russia may pay an economic cost through sanctions, but Putin is clearly calculating that economic sanctions with either not last long, or will not be all that costly or both.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the US learned about how a nation-state can respond to the super-empowered individual, and it found the experience to be messy, largely unsatisfying, and costly.  Now the US (and all nation-states) will have to figure out how to respond to the diffuse aggression of nations of people within foreign states.  This isn't a new problem: witness how China has occupied Tibet. The world of nation-states will be challenged to come up with new solutions to this problem in the coming decades, lest they wake up one morning to discover that their sovereignty is merely a thought from the past.

PISA results and motivation

A confluence occurred:

A) NBC News ran a story about the PISA results on December 3rd, in which a Chinese student (who appears to be high school-aged but wasn't identified as such), when asked, "Why do you want to study so much?" responded, "Because I want to have a better future."

B) A colleague was telling me that very few of her students even knew about the John and Abigail Adams Scholarship, which offers free in-state college tuition to students who score highly on all aspects of the MCAS exam.  Many students appeared to be downright shocked to know that this was even available, and several commented that they would have tried harder had they known about this their sophomore years.

C) While researching information for my Modern America class, I saw that, according to an article in EdWeek citing stats from the US Department of Education, in 1969, 77% of the population of the US had a high school diploma.  More recently, this number has settled to just under 70%. That's a lot of high school diplomas...

These three things converged in my head to cause me to think that part of why the US is being "passed" by other countries on measurements of assessment like PISA, is not only because we are teaching outmoded content in outmoded ways, but is also because our students are hell and gone from the attitude displayed by the student in China.  There is little to no connection in the minds of our students that a high school education is the door to a better future. High school is what they do because they have to. They are required to be there, but they don't see how their learning could lead to a better job, a higher wage, and thus greater economic security. Where that got lost, I don't know, but it got lost. "I have to be here," is what many of my students say when I ask why they come to school.

I think that if more American students saw both an intrinsic and extrinsic value to what they did in high school, they would be more invested at performing at a high level, and thus would apply themselves more--they would "try harder" to get that scholarship.  I'm left wondering who and when and where and how can we as a society can communicate this value to our teenagers. "So you can go to college," is lovely, but if more, future school is the reward for school, the value and motivation wanes for focusing on what is immediately in front of the person. Especially when the person is 15. And especially when the person is being presented with irrelevant material...

Oh, and apparently 6100 15 year old US students took the PISA. According to the US Department of Education, that's out of a total high school age population of about 20 million (public and private) students aged 14-18. You can decide if that is or is not a representative sample of students, and thus whether or not we should be gnashing our teeth about being surpassed by Vietnam...

And if you like, the PISA results are tabulated here. Makes for some interesting reading...

Goal vs. Plan

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best: "A goal without a plan is just a wish."

Needed in some schools: Stop wishing; start planning!

My goal for my department is to successfully implement Common Core Reading and Writing standards in our curriculum by the 2014-2015 school year.

My plan began two years ago.

Year 1 (12-13)
Step 1: "Be an expert." I need to become an expert in Common Core Reading and Writing standards.  My timeline to become an expert: 1 school year. I will attend conferences, gather information, and spend time reviewing the different standards.

Step 2: "Play."  Design my own activities that utilize the language of the Common Core and try them out in my class.

Step 3: "Collaborate." Work with someone else in my discipline to expand my practical understanding of the standards.

Step 4: "Shake Hands." Once I know my stuff, I will have the members of my department meet the standards; We will discuss them as a group (both small and large) and have the opportunity to develop an understanding of what the standards are asking.

Year 2 (13-14)
Step 5: "Integrate." Have members of my department create assignments that align with Common Core Reading Standards. This is done collaboratively, with large group sharing of outcomes.

Step 6: "Evaluate, Re-Create/Curate." Have members of the department utilize the standards in the creation of common assessments, collect data on student performance, then tweak for future use. Share and curate assessments that are created. This is where we are now.

Step 7: "Be comfortable." Department members are familiar with the Reading Standards, have several resources at hand, and have designed lessons, activities and assessments that reflect the standards. No one is a stranger to the standards, and colleagues are supportive.

Step 8: "Repeat with a twist." The department will go back to Year 1, step 4 with the Writing Standards, and cycle through steps 5-7 with them during the latter half of this year and first part of the 14-15 year.

Year 3 (January, 2015)
Step 9: "Relax." The department should feel comfortable (and perhaps slightly smug) about their mastery of the Common Core Standards.

Is it perfect? No, of course not.  It won't be all smooth either.

But it is a plan, and it does help my goal become realized.

Which gives me an excuse to say:

"I love it when a plan comes together." --John "Hannibal" Smith.

A response to Trevor Packer about AP World History Scores

Today, Trevor Packer, the College Board's Head of AP, according to his twitter bio, tweeted the following:

AP World History scores, 2013. 5: 5.7%. 4: 13.5%. 3: 29.4%. 2: 30.4%. 1: 21%. These may shift slightly as late exams are scored.

This year’s AP World History essays earned the lowest scores ever. It appears many students are being rushed into the course.

Out of 9 points possible on each of the 3 AP World History essays, the mean scores were: 2, 1, 1, the lowest essay scores ever on this exam.

113,000 AP World Hist students (60% of all) earned 0/9 pts on Q2 (politics – continuity/change in medieval cultures)

Ideally, AP World History is a 12th grade course, after a standard world history course in an earlier grade. But some 10th graders excel.

The AP World History exam is designed and scored by many college faculty, who ensure it reflects the standards of a college course.

You can see the actual tweets if you go to the feed of @AP_Trevor. 

So the test results indicated that students did universally poorly on the Free Response Questions with mean scores of 2, 1, and 1. Why is that, I wonder? And overall, the vast majority of students who wrote the exam, over 70%, did not earn a score that would garner them college credit!

In my experience, any teacher worth his or her salt can look at student performance on an exam and gauge a number of things. The majority of good teachers, when confronted with a universal fail (because that's what mean scores on the FRQs of 1 and 2 out of 9 are: failure) are faced with one of two causes for that failure. It is either a failure to prepare well, or it is a failure to write a good test. Mr. Packer would indicate by his tweets that it is the former, and not the latter, and that this is due largely to students being "rushed" into taking a course that is ideally taught to 12th grade. On what does he base this assumption? Presumably, since all AP courses must submit a syllabus to the audit process and receive approval to be named "AP," the College Board is aware of the grade levels, content, structure and pedagogy of the class being taught. Is Mr. Packer indicating that the College Board has been rubber stamping courses that are poorly structured? Surely not. Is Mr. Packer indicating that they should not approve this course to be taught to any grade lower than 12th? Why, then, are classes like mine, taught to 11th graders, approved? If the course is for 12th grade, then it would behoove the College Board to limit the courses designated as AP to lower grades by applying an even stricter standard of pedagogy to those syllabi for non-senior classes. But they don't. Perhaps there is not enough free response practice built into the syllabi of the nation's classrooms teaching AP World. But if that were the case, why are classes lacking in sufficient practice time approved? My students write an essay every two weeks, and we spend a lengthy amount of time reviewing the score guides. Is that not enough because they are juniors and not seniors? I don't think that Mr. Packer has a leg to stand on with his justification for the score results based on preparation. This simply is not an acceptable reason for the low rate of success on the Free Response Questions, and the low overall scores unless Mr. Packer is meaning to discredit the audit process. And maybe he is, but since his checks come from the College Board, I rather doubt it.

No, the conclusion we can point to is that the Free Response Questions were poorly constructed. Now, Mr. Packer's defense is that the exam is scored and designed by "many college faculty." This would certainly help to explain why recent questions are written around such esoterica as Cricket and Indian Politics, the mechanization of the textile industries in Japan and India in the late 1800's, and the "continuity and change of politics in medival cultures." Could you write a broader question? When 60% of your students can't even write an acceptable thesis statement for a question and gain one point, Mr. Packer, you have a poorly. written. question. Or you have 113,000 poorly prepared students nation wide. So which is it? Were the 40% who scored higher than a 0 on that question all the 12th graders? I doubt it.

Mr. Packer, the initial test data are telling you that you need to hire a different group of people to write your questions, because the esoteric minutia that interests your "many college faculty" don't result in good questions. I have not seen the FRQ's from this year's exam, and I shall not rely upon my student's reportage to comment on them specifically. But I can feel very safe in assuming that the questions did two things: poorly represent the scope of actual world history in any larger sense (i.e.: they were likely pulled from 600CE-2000, (a mere 1400 years, not even close to the full 8,000 years the course is supposed to address) and that they relied upon students using information about Europe to generate answers. Those are the overwhelming trends of the FRQ's in recent years. Perhaps the "many college faculty" who design and score the course are all specialists in European history? are all a group of modernists? cast offs from the AP European cohort? Of course, when you design a course that is not supposed to deal with Europe and North America, and then you only design the test questions around Europe and North America, those are the results you get. Face it, Mr. Packer, just as happened in 2002 with the first time around, your "many college faculty" wrote a bad test.

The Myth of Digital Natives

Year two of the 1:1 iPad initiative in my school is progressing, and as time has passed, I've been realizing that a fundamental assumption I was making was completely wrong.

In 2001, Marc Prensky wrote that, "our students today are all "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet." (You can read his work at: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf) I read this at the time and thought he was correct in his description of the "digital native," and I accepted that I was a "digital immigrant."  However time and experience has helped me to realize the error of his and my assumptions.

I agree with Prensky that there is a difference between the students today and the teachers who teach them in terms of levels of comfort with the technology. My students are fearless with their handling of devices. (Often too fearless, as evidenced by the rising number of cracked, chipped and spider webbed screens in my classroom...) However, there is a difference in being fearless with handling and being fearless with using! They are not native speakers of the technology they hold. Here's why I think so:

1) A digital native would instinctively utilize digital tools. When I ask my students to articulate their understanding of a topic and give them a free choice of how to do it, they automatically gravitate toward something that they draw, hand write or compose on paper. They do not gravitate toward anything on the iPad.  They have to be anywhere from encouraged to required to leave the comfort of paper and writing implements to make use of the digital tool they hold in their hand.  Their default is analog, not digital.

2) A digital native who spoke the language of computers and the internet would be able to do more than a rudimentary search for a topic in a search engine. They would be able to ask sophisticated questions in a way that would actually use the search engine to find answers to their questions without me having to teach them how to use the tool. Yes, they all go to Google to do research, and they prefer that to researching in books. But, all the ways to refine a digital search continue to elude my students at the deep, native level, and instead this trait exists on a superficial level.

3) A digital native would be able to creatively take advantage of digital tools available to them. They would be able to generate ideas in a digital format and see them through to completion without the instructor having to model the use of the format, the composition and the creation. This I have to do every time we do a project in my class. Any app we use must be explained and demonstrated by me before my students will make use of it in an independent fashion. And even then, they will only use the tool in the way in which I showed it to them; they neither take risks with it nor do they innovate with the tool to combine it with other tools.

I have stopped giving my students a wide open range to express themselves while using the iPad. The results are disappointing.  The students say it is overwhelming, they don't know how to use the iPad and its many apps to articulate their understanding, and they need me to show them how, tell them what to do, and translate their paper desires into a digital format.

Perhaps, now that my district has pushed iPads down to middle school and will expand into the elementary schools in the coming year, when a student who is currently in kindergarten arrives in my classroom having had this device as a part of his or her educational life, I will not have to lead them in the use of technology, and they will begin to resemble the digital native Prensky described.

This is all not to say that the iPad isn't working well, for in many ways it is, it is just to say that we teachers can't assume that our students are going to be any more knowledgeable, creative and comfortable with digital learning tools than we are.  At this point, I may be older than my students, but I remain a level above them when it comes to knowing how effectively to use technology to learn.  And that means that sadly, Mr. Prensky was wrong.

The failure of high school Social Studies teachers

As I watch this election season unfold, I have one, over-riding thought:

We. Failed.

And by "We," I mean Social Studies teachers.

And by "Failed," I mean we have not taught our citizens how to talk about politics. As a result, our citizens can't talk to each other about the important issues of the day in anything other than a fact-avoidant, hyperbolic, simultaneous, shouting match where volume overrules logic, stupid is celebrated, and hyperbole is evidence. This election season shows the failure of the public high school system to prepare generations of responsible, thoughtful citizens.

Concurrent with our society losing the ability to have reasoned discourse in our civic life, we, the teachers, have lost our willingness to tackle these issues in our classrooms. It seems to me that we, the teachers, are scared to even try to do so for fear of parent, administrative and media backlash.

We have failed.

No more. I'm bringing politics back to my high school.  I will leave my personal ideological biases at the door of the school. I will teach my students have to have a reasoned discourse about the issues that plague our society.

I will be the difference in my students' civic lives that will help to mold them into a generation that doesn't blindly drink the intellectually thin soup the media currently feeds us. I will lead my students away from the painted harlot that is demagoguery. I will bring them back to the idea that there is a larger cause than just individual satisfaction, and that being an informed citizen is the best kind of community service.

I will have my students address the controversial issues of our country. We will talk about abortion, gun control, and the death penalty. We will talk about states' rights and federal rights. We will talk about the deficit, the budget, and spending priorities. We will talk about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, "the general welfare" and the obligations inherent in a social contract between the government and the governed. We will address the concerns of the day in a way that will cause my students not to argue with anger but rather to argue with intellect and facts.  We will invite parents and the community to have this discussion with us, and I will teach my students how to lead those discussions.

There is no one else who can arrest the decline in civil, civic discourse in this country but Social Studies teachers. No other group of people has the ability to reach each and every future citizen; no other group has the chance to make this change before it is too late. Not the media, not the parties, not the elected officials, not the parents. It's just we, the teachers, who can do this.

So I throw down this gauntlet all of you, my colleagues in high schools across the nation. Leave your ideological biases at the schoolhouse door along with your fears that reason can't trump emotion and help to get this country back on track with reasoned discourse on issues of continental importance.

Pick it up.