Michael Horn on the Purpose of Schooling

Through much of the 1800s, a kind reading of history would say that the central role of public schools was to preserve American democracy and inculcate democratic values.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, competition with a fast-rising industrial Germany constituted a mini-crisis. The country shifted by creating a new role for public schools: to prepare everyone for vocations. That meant providing something for everyone, with a flourishing of tracks and courses and enrollment in high school.

Another purpose was added to America’s schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s: keeping the country competitive. Although this one had echoes of the prior purpose, it was quite different, as the nation became consumed by how students were doing in school as measured through average test scores.

The vast choices that students had in a “cafeteria-style curriculum,” the landmark report “A Nation at Risk” noted, was one “in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses.” Having something for everyone, in other words, was no longer a virtue. It was a vice.

Just 20 years later, the primary purpose shifted again to asking schools to eliminate poverty by not just focusing on schools’ average test scores, but instead to make sure that children in every demographic, on average, reach a basic measure of proficiency in core subjects. The theory of action, in essence, was that academic achievement would unlock opportunity.

As much of that consensus has eroded in recent years, there has been some drift in the primary purpose of schooling from a political perspective, but what it is at the level of an individual school is a vital conversation to build a coherent model.

Schools tackle this in different ways. A common exercise for a school is to construct a portrait of a graduate to try and understand what an individual entering the world in some number of years would need to be prepared to lead a choice-filled and civically engaged life.

For my part, I’d argue that the goal at a high level is producing students who are prepared to maximize their human potential, build their passions and lead choice-filled lives, participate civically in a vibrant democracy, contribute meaningfully to the world and the economy, and understand that people can see things differently—and that those differences merit respect rather than persecution. As such, I’d encourage schools to think through five domains as they build specifics around their central purpose and priorities:

The goal of school should be to produce students who can maximize their potential, build their passions, participate civically in a democracy, contribute meaningfully to the world, and understand that people can see things differently.

CLICK TO TWEET

1. Content knowledge. There’s a mountain of research on the importance of academic achievement and content knowledge across a range of disciplines. After students learn how to read, for example, evidence suggests that the ability to distill the meaning of new passages we confront isn’t so much a skill as something that is derivative of our knowledge base about the topic we’re reading. Building academic achievement to at least a baseline is important for future life success.

2. Skills. The purpose of knowledge isn’t necessarily for its own sake, but so that an individual can do useful things with that knowledge and apply it in ways that make a meaningful contribution. Critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity are vital skills that employers report consistently as being more and more important for their employees. The ability to use these skills, of course, is dependent on having some domain knowledge. As in, I can think critically and communicate well about the future of education (some would agree with that statement anyway!), but if you dropped me in a coding job, for example, I would be lost and unable to apply any of these skills. At the same time, as the example of the Minerva Institute shows—and as is described in Building the Intentional University by Ben Nelson and Stephen Kosslyn, as well as in books like Critical Thinking by Jonathan Haber—these skills can be defined and individuals can learn how to do them in a repeatable and intentional process. As an individual masters these skills in a variety of domains with intentionality—not something the vast majority of schools focus on today—individuals can then more rapidly apply them in new domains as they master its knowledge and lexicon.

3. Habits of success. Also called character skills, social-emotional skills, and noncognitive skills (my least favorite), habits of success revolve around things like self-regulation, executive function skills, growth mindset, self-efficacy, agency, self-direction, and more. Education psychologist Brooke Stafford-Brizard developed a framework around 16 of these habits for Turnaround for Children, which Summit Public Schools has most notably put into action in its schools. These are the sorts of habits that help turn individuals into lifelong learners capable of navigating life’s twists and turns—arguably more important than ever as the half-life of knowledge and skills continues to shrink in the digital age of the knowledge economy. And they can best be modeled, taught, and learned in the context of students’ academic journeys—not as a set of add-on modules.

4. Real-world experiences and social capital. Connecting school to the real world—through projects, extracurricular activities, externships, internships, and more—is important so that students can build a deeper sense for the different ways in which they can contribute to the world, why what they are learning matters, why certain goals are worth attaining, and what resonates with them, among other meaningful opportunities. If the goal of school is not just to ensure students are prepared academically but also that they have access to good life opportunities and careers, then relationships will also be critical. As Julia Freeland Fisher argues in her book, Who You Know, in today’s world, schools need to engage in this activity. After building a baseline of academic knowledge and skills, who you know often trumps what you know in life. And teaching content knowledge, skills, and habits of success in the context of real-world experiences and the cultivation of social capital can be a critical way to ensure success for all students across all these domains.

5. Health and wellness. As schools come back from a challenging time thanks to the pandemic, students will have a variety of different challenges around their social and emotional wellbeing, as well as their more basic health and wellness. Although there’s an argument around whether schools should be involved in these areas, for students to learn effectively, if they aren’t in a sound state in their wellbeing or health, learning will be challenging at best—which means it will land in the domain of schools. On top of that, schools have always played some role in health and wellness—witness the long history of physical and health education in schools. But I’d argue that we’ve often distorted the purpose of these sorts of experiences and that we ought to return to a more foundational one around preparing students to live healthy lives—and being sure to see these domains as not separate from academic learning, but as critically integrated.

If one accepts these baseline ideas, the nuance of how they land in any given schooling community will differ—and the approach to implementing them should likely be personalized based on each student’s distinct needs and background. But as a starting point, taking these domains and building SMART goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound around each would be where I’d advocate starting.

Michael B. Horn

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently serves as Chairman of the Clayton Christensen Institute and works as a senior strategist at Guild Education. 

Don’t just flip the classroom, flip the school day

Don’t just flip the classroom, flip the school day
By: Michael B. Horn

Oct 10, 2019
Flipping the classroom—in which students independently consume online lessons or lectures and then spend their time in the classroom focused on what we used to call homework—crashed on the scene eight years ago. But if Bob Harris, president of Edudexterity and currently working as the head of human resources for Pittsburgh’s school district, is to be believed, it isn’t enough.

It’s time to flip the high school day, he says, and he has plans for how to do it.

The basic idea is that almost all students would benefit from gaining a variety of real work experiences while in high school because they would gain a deeper appreciation for their potential directions in life; an understanding of their strengths, passions and purpose—a glaring gap in high schools that emerged in research for our new book Choosing College—and social capital in the form of mentors and potential professional connections outside of school and the circles of their family and friends, about which my colleague Julia Freeland Fisher has written extensively.

In Harris’s conception of the flipped school day, students would start their day at 9 a.m.—more in line with the research around when teenagers should wake up and start their days—by reporting to a workplace that could rotate every semester or year.

After working half a day, the students would then break for lunch and head to school to do their extracurricular activities and work on projects with their fellow students.

Finally, in the evenings, students would take their classes online from home when their parents are more likely to be at home—also more in line with research that suggests students tend to perform better in courses that meet later in the day. They wouldn’t have homework per se, as work would simply be woven into their online learning experiences.

One of Harris’s insights is that a big reason school exists as it does is that it plays an important custodial function in the lives of many families. For years, the only way to learn from a teacher was in a classroom.

But with the advent of online learning, students can theoretically learn anywhere, which means that you can change what you do during the times when it’s important to provide custodial care for students. All too often, students are already doing most of their learning late in the evening anyway. Rather than fight it, why not embrace it?

All too often, students are already doing most of their learning late in the evening anyway. Rather than fight it, why not embrace it?
CLICK TO TWEET
Plus, far fewer teenagers—roughly 20%—hold a job today compared to a generation ago when 40% did. Flipping the school day would rectify that challenge and fill the morning time in a productive fashion.

Doing so would also equip students with an understanding of how their learning connected to their potential careers after school, which, in the ideal, would help them build motivation for when and what they learn online—which itself could be far more tailored for their learning needs, both in terms of the choice of courses and in terms of the learning pace and path within the courses.

It would also seem to present an interesting solution to the return of people’s nostalgia for career and technical education. And by flipping the school day for all students, it could potentially avoid the historical perils of tracking students into academic versus career pathways in high school.

Flipping the school day for all students could potentially avoid the historical perils of tracking students into academic versus career pathways in high school.

Finally, flipping the school day could also greatly bolster the counseling function in high schools. Today counselors operate at a 491-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio in high schools, which means there is little time for meaningful advice for students. But by placing students into jobs in the community, schools could potentially leverage a far wider swath of their community’s resources to help counsel and guide students into the choices they make in their lives.

If no high school wants to go all-in on the experiment, then they could try it as a pilot for a segment of their students. In so doing, they could also use it to create more capacity in their school by changing when and how the building is utilized and providing more shifts for students so that the schools would be open for far longer, act more as community centers, and students could experience smaller class sizes with teachers.

Given all we know, flipping the school day seems like a worthwhile experiment to me.


Michael B. Horn

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently works as a principal consultant for Entangled Solutions.

When Learning is Paramount, New Models Emerge

Medical students are skipping class in droves — and making lectures increasingly obsolete
Future doctors are skipping class in droves and making lectures increasingly obsolete

Harvard Medical School’s curriculum changed to meet new demands in 2015.

By Orly Nadell Farber, STAT
The future doctors of America cut class. Not to gossip in the bathroom or flirt behind the bleachers. They skip to learn — at twice the speed.

Some medical students follow along with class remotely, watching sped-up recordings of their professors at home, in their pajamas. Others rarely tune in. At one school, attendance is so bad that a Nobel laureate recently lectured to mostly empty seats.

Nationally, nearly one-quarter of second-year medical students reported last year that they “almost never’’ attended class during their first two, preclinical years, a 5 percent increase from 2015.

The AWOL students highlight increasing dissatisfaction and anxiety that there’s a mismatch between what they’re taught in class during those years and what they’re expected to know — or how they’re tested — on national licensing exams. Despite paying nearly $60,000 a year in tuition, medical students are turning to unsanctioned online resources to prepare for Step 1, the make-or-break test typically taken at the end of the preclinical years.

These self-guided med students are akin to a group of American tourists wandering through Tokyo without a map. Like a tour guide hired on the street, the online learning tools — including memory aids, videos, and online quizzes — can enhance the educational journey, or send the students down a dead end.

Lawrence Wang, a third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Institutes of Health, said he relied heavily on these resources during his first two years of medical school.

“There were times that I didn’t go to a single class, and then I’d get to the actual exam and it would be my first time seeing the professor,’’ he said. “Especially, when Step was coming up, I pretty much completely focused on studying outside materials.’’

Wang isn’t alone. According to 2017 data from the Association for American Medical Colleges, 1 in 4 preclinical students watches educational videos — like those on YouTube — on a daily basis. And according to two video developers, tens of thousands of medical students subscribe to their products — one of which costs $250 for two years, the other $370 for one year.

Leaders in medical education have begun to scramble. Some medical schools, like Harvard, have done away with lectures for the most part. Instead of spending hours in an auditorium, Harvard students learn the course content at home and then apply the knowledge in mandatory small group sessions.

Other institutions, like Johns Hopkins, are moving in the same direction, but have yet to make a full switch. Hopkins cut down on lectures and boosted sessions that require active student participation. Preclinical lecture attendance hovers around 30 to 40 percent, according to Dr. Nancy Hueppchen, associate dean for curriculum.

For many students, she said, licensing exam prep begins on day one of medical school: “They have this parallel curriculum going along with what we’re teaching them.’’

Step 1, an eight-hour multiple choice test, is a big deal. Performance on the exam, though it’s taken before most students even begin training in a hospital, heavily influences which medical specialties they can eventually pursue after school and at what hospitals they can pursue them.

With medical schools grading pass-fail, the Step 1 score is an increasingly significant piece of information that’s used to sort through residency applications, Hueppchen said. When she took the exam, it was only used as a pass-fail test. Today, residency programs rely on the score more heavily; students and faculty suspect that it’s used as a cutoff for making admissions decisions.

Ryan Carlson, a third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, said that his school focused on teaching “what they thought was important for a physician to know.’’ But medical students have to know more than what is relevant to a practicing clinician to succeed on Step. The exam focuses on rare diseases and other minutiae, said Carlson, who now tutors for the test.

Hueppchen acknowledged that students at Hopkins and elsewhere “express some distrust that they’re getting everything they need — or that we’re being meticulous in pointing out what they need — to study for and excel on the Step 1 exam.’’

***

That distrust has spawned a cottage industry of online study aids. Most are a far cry from your high school SAT prep course.

SketchyMedical is one of the most popular guides. The company, built in 2013 by three then-medical students at the University of California, Irvine, produces visual memory aids with elaborate illustrations to help students learn and retain the voluminous material they’re expected to know.

Dr. Andrew Berg and his co-founders, Drs. Saud Siddiqui and Bryan Lemieux, started sketching pictures and pairing them with stories while taking microbiology in their second year of medical school.

“We were just bombarded with different names of bacteria, viruses, and fungi, and we were having a tough time keeping them all straight,’’ he said.

The sketches helped them, and now other students are using them, too.

Imagine it’s test day and a med student is asked which drug she would use to treat a patient’s postoperative gastrointestinal blockage. The student closes her eyes and mentally enters the world of “Acetyl-Cola,’’ a bustling port town that’s depicted in one of SketchyMedical’s cartoons. Outside a storefront, the student finds construction workers, motorcyclists wearing brain-shaped helmets, piles of dripping-wet fish, and a man sporting an adrenal gland-shaped beanie.

A colon-shaped mixing truck pouring out cement is an unfortunate, but effective, symbol for defecation, and a worker wearing a name tag reading “Beth’’ and drinking a cola reminds the student of the drug bethanechol, given to treat intestinal obstructions.

The illustrations are turned into narrated videos, which teach drug names and their mechanisms and side effects. SketchyMedical has also produced videos on microbiology and pathology.

Berg compares the work of Sketchy to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. But for many, Sketchy evokes a different technique used a thousand years later in ancient Greece: method of loci, also called a memory palace or journey.

Memory palaces are typically imagined spaces in which a person can store information like a string of numbers or a series of words. Each piece of information is placed somewhere inside the palace. When the palace builder wants to recall an item, she can take a mental stroll through the space to retrieve it. This technique famously enabled Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, to commit his speeches to memory.

“We accidentally stumbled upon these visual learning techniques, but now looking back we see there’s a lot of evidence supporting visual learning,’’ Berg said.

SketchyMedical is not the only extracurricular resource students rely on. An entire industry cropped up in the last few years, marketing videos and self-quizzing features to preclinical students. Dr. Jason Ryan, the creator of Boards and Beyond, is a name (and voice) familiar to medical students across the country.

Ryan, a faculty member at University of Connecticut School of Medicine, creates explanatory videos that track along with the content in First Aid, a Step preparatory book that Ryan said is more like “an encyclopedia of terms’’ than a real study aid. Ask any medical student if they use First Aid, and they’ll point you to their heavily annotated, tattered copy.

While both Ryan and Berg consider their products supplements to regular medical education, many students view them as necessary investments for success. Choosing which ones to use can be a challenge, however.

“That was the biggest learning curve of med school — it wasn’t so much how do I do well in it, it was, how do I use all these crazy resources that are being marketed to me to best meet my goal of passing Step,’’ Carlson said.

***

This expanding corner of the medical education industry is both a product of a new attitude among students — born from anxiety surrounding exam prep — and a disrupter of the traditional classroom education. Med schools now have to think more creatively about how they train their future doctors, Berg said.

In 2015, Harvard Medical School revamped its curriculum for the first two years to enable clinical exposure and boost class attendance with a flipped-classroom model: Students learn the content at home, and then apply it during in-class exercises. Dr. Richard Schwartzstein, director of education scholarship, said the program now emphasizes problem-solving and critical thinking — skills seen as essential to practicing medicine — instead of factual recall.

But while medical schools are de-emphasizing pure memorization, the national licensing exams have yet to reconsider, he acknowledged. Still, Schwartzstein is not a huge fan of external resources, citing their focus on memorization and pattern recognition as major weaknesses.

“You don’t have to actually teach pattern recognition,’’ he said. “We all are born with the capability of recognizing pattern.’’ He advises students to stick to Harvard-developed videos and their recommended readings. Like many medical schools, Harvard gives students a dedicated study period — six to eight weeks without coursework — to “prepare in whatever way they deem most appropriate to take the boards,’’ he said.

Hueppchen said that the outside resources “may have value in day-to-day studying, they may have value in studying for Step 1,’’ but Hopkins has not vetted them so it doesn’t recommend them to students either.

The National Board of Medical Examiners, which works with state medical boards to set the minimum standards for medical licensing and administers the Step exam, also doesn’t endorse these products — or their use as hard lines for residency admissions, said Dr. Michael Barone, vice president of licensure programs. The group “is aware of some secondary uses of scores,’’ he said, but the test’s primary purpose is to report licensure alone.

So long as Step still requires intensive rote memorization, companies like SketchyMedical and Boards and Beyond will likely remain in business.

Both Berg and Ryan agree that physicians no longer need to memorize as much as they did in the past. Ryan’s grandmother was one of the first female physicians to graduate from her medical school in the 1940s. Back then, he said, she had to remember everything. “If she had to go to a book every time she saw a patient, she’d never be able to work through the day.’’

Today, there’s much more to know, and medicine is evolving so rapidly that physicians can’t possibly remember it all. Instead, they look information up on their cellphones, using a variety of apps on the clinic floors. But preclinical students still need to commit board-tested material to memory, a task often compared to drinking from a firehose.

Needing to memorize for boards and learn in parallel for their institutions is the breeding ground for anxiety that Hueppchen said “has truly detracted from the joy of learning.’’ It has even detracted from the joy of teaching, she added.

Berg said he tries to bring joy to memorization: “I think that what I hope to contribute the most is making studying more fun.’’

Orly Nadell Farber is a reporting intern at STAT, where a version of this article first appeared.

Michael Horn on G+L vs CBE

Let’s retire the ‘gifted-and-talented’ label

By: Michael B. Horn

Aug 9, 2018

Earlier this year the Fordham Institute wrote about the challenge of the gifted gap in our nation’s schools. Put simply, gifted students from disadvantaged backgrounds too often are not identified as gifted, which causes them to lose out on access to a variety of gifted-and-talented programs at their local schools that could accelerate their development and social and economic opportunities.

The report’s authors offer seemingly three solid recommendations toward this end—universal screening for gifted students; identification of gifted students within each school, not just district-wide; and active efforts to counter bias.

Those make sense if we assume gifted programs are a good idea. But in a day and age where we can move past our factory-model schools and personalize learning for all students, such that students can move at their own pace and not grow bored or disengaged and can dive deep into areas of passion, should schools be in the business of placing labels on students designed to sort them?

Count me as unconvinced.

In 2010, a fifth-grade student named Jack (his name is disguised) started the year at the bottom of his class in math at Santa Rita Elementary School in the Los Altos School District in California. I visited the class several times during the year. Jack had struggled to keep up in math and grew to consider himself one of those kids who would just never quite ‘‘get it.’’ In a typical school, he would have been tracked and placed in the bottom math group—and he certainly would not have been considered a “gifted” student. That would have meant that he would not have taken Algebra until high school, which would have negatively impacted his college and career choices.

But Jack’s story took a less familiar turn. His school transformed his class into a “blended-learning” environment to personalize the learning. After 70 days of using Khan Academy’s online math tutorials and exercises for a portion of his math three to four days a week, rather than remaining tracked in the bottom math group, Jack rose to become one of the top four students in his class. He was working on material well above grade level.

The reality was that Jack had just missed some mathematical concepts in much earlier grades that continued to haunt him. When he had the opportunity to revisit those concepts and master them, several of his misunderstandings disappeared. Jack started to soar.

The traditional system would never have been able to reach Jack. Its treatment of students like him amount to educational malpractice, even though we do not call it so. Labeling other kids as gifted would have damaged Jack’s ability to make progress, both because of his self-perception as well as others’ perception of him.

As Jack’s performance changed, Jack’s self-perception changed as well. I am also fairly certain that Jack’s performance, as well as that of his classmates, will remain uneven, with bursts of accelerated progress and periods of struggle.

Closer to home in Lexington, Mass., where I live, over coffee a parent told me that his daughter in the eighth grade was anguishing over whether to take regular or honors math next year in high school. The stress over the decision was intense, he said. As stress like this builds, he told me that many parents were considering taking their students out of the public school system. I couldn’t believe this was all just over what math class a 14-year-old should take. Why did she have to choose, label herself, and place herself on a track with no flexibility?

If Lexington Public Schools moved to a mastery-based system, one in which students progress as they master material, not based on an arbitrary measure of time, and utilized blended learning to personalize for each student, she could just take “math.” Lexington High School could maintain a minimum pace at which she had to move and then she and the school could see how far and deep she could move in mathematics. In the course of taking it, she might surprise herself—and avoid closing off a door too early. If colleges really needed a label later to evaluate her, the school could retroactively provide one based on her actual progress.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for saying everyone is above average and giving medals for participation. A mastery-based system is more rigorous than our current one because students would only make progress by demonstrating mastery of learning. Rewards would only follow true mastery. But I’m also unconvinced applying labels makes sense when, in a personalized system, those same labels could be wrong and outdated on any given day. Labeling risks shortchanging a lot of students. And society loses, as we miss out on fully developing future human capital.

If we give students like Jack the stretch opportunities they need to soar without labeling them gifted—or avoid incorrectly labeling them and taking away those same opportunities—don’t we create a better system?

The more important principle is to make sure we do not shortchange students based on their race, income, or gender. And if we start judging everyone based on mastery, I think our chances are a lot higher of fixing that problem than if we continue to obsess about labels.

Michael B. Horn

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently works as a principal consultant for Entangled Solutions.

Personalized, Competency-Based

“Personalized, Competency-Based.” These three words (maybe two words, depending on how you count) most succinctly define an approach to education that puts each learner at the center of the learning ecosystem.  An alternative term often used for this movement, “blended learning,”  while it has advantages, evoking nuance and hybrid approach, instead of false dichotomies (such as digital and physical, testing and anti-testing, whole language and phonics, new math and old), loses the imperative to move past antiquated approaches to teaching and learning, built from 18th century Prussian model, and brought to scale under Horace Mann in America as universal public education.

Although this assembly line model for education made universal public education possible, it no longer serves our diverse population to prepare them for the careers of the future.  Since the 90s, all 50 states have worked towards clarifying academic standards in core academic areas that are aligned with preparation for college and careers.  Whether based on Common Core, or not, each state has published a taxonomy of 50-100 competency statements for each grade and subject.   In an effort to ensure all young people stay on track to these standards, ability-grouped tracking has lost favor and been replaced by a commitment to all kids.  While an understandable reaction to the demonstrated stigma of hard tracking, this approach has resulted in classrooms that by middle grades where a math teacher may be challenged by students whose math abilities may range from one or more grade behind to one or more grade ahead, therefore, spanning perhaps 600 skill differential between highest and lowest performing students.  From this perspective, “teaching to the middle,” makes little sense.

Instead, as Sal Kahn says, we can “flip the classroom,” and provide anytime, any place, any pace access to learning experiences that target the “zone of proximal learning” for each student.  Instead of moving with the herd of learners by age and grade, each learner can “move on when ready” to the content and depth optimized to their needs. In these new learning environments, teachers become elevated from that of lab technician, working nights and weekends in a near futile attempt to provide timely feedback, to learning doctors, synthesizing self-grading learning materials into personalized, constructive feedback.

We stand at the brink of a new era in education; one in which learners demonstrate skills in diverse settings both within and outside traditional schools.  For less than 1% of the average US K12 budget, every student in America can have access to a learning device like a Chromebook.  New skills, like computational thinking, add to the foundational skills of numeracy and literacy that are rapidly becoming indispensable for participating in the new economy.  Open source, not-for-profit, and philanthropic learning tool providers like EnageNY, Open Up, Kahn Academy, Code.org, EdX are providing a rapidly growing set of high-quality free resources.  While many public schools remain on the treadmill of letter grades on transcripts targeting college admissions, elite independent schools across the nation are shifting the conversation by coming together through the Mastery Transcript Consortium to replace letter grades on transcripts within five years.  Although the federal government is no longer providing meaningful leadership, US global tech titans Apple through XQ Super Schools and FaceBook through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have joined foundations funded by Gates, Dell, and Hewlett to help spur the innovation needed for these changes to occur.

What does it look like?  A classroom that has been “flipped” provides learners with online videos and reading material they can watch and read at their own pace, and often in their own language, in their home or any other informal learning environment.  When in school, in the presence of a trained educator, learners typically benefit most from learning while doing, practicing skills like writing and problem solving under the supervision and support of their teacher.  The classroom is flipped because the type of active learning traditionally assigned to homework is done in the classroom and the more passive reading and viewing are done outside of class.  In this environment, learners are freer to move at their own pace, practicing each skill until mastery is evidenced and then moving on instead of waiting for classmates.  Taken to its logical extreme, the concepts of “class” and “course” break down to learning modules that group students more dynamically and avoid the negative consequences of rigid tracking.

What should states do to support personalized, competency-based learning?  The evolution of the learning ecosystem occurs at all levels, individual, class, school, district, and state.  States have a critical role, establishing the conditions to support local innovation.  Most importantly, as I described in my prior post, state-supported summative assessments must evolve to take less instructional time and separate faster accountability instruments from embedded diagnostic tools.  In addition to that, states need to support technology and policies that enable learners to pursue pathways to future careers through an open system of micro-credential badges.  

States like Georgia are leading the charge.  Since 2015, under the leadership of State Superintendent of Schools, Richard Woods, the Georgia Department of Education has been committed to leading the Nation in use of open standards, open source technology, open education resources, and free educational resources to create personalized learning pathways for the next generation of Georgia learners.  GA DOE will begin this work with a focus on computer science and computational thinking and will expand to all other subjects.  They are developing partnerships from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and leading education foundations to establish a micro-credential pathway from K-12 to military enlistment/training, employment/occupational licenses, and postsecondary learning.  When complete, Georgia will become the first state in the nation to implement scalable policies to support personalized, competency-based learning.  

Evidence of Khan positive impact

By Caitlin Emma

05/08/2017 03:49 PM EDT

Students who use free SAT preparation materials from the nonprofit Khan Academy for about 20 hours gain an average of 115 points on the 1,600-point test, the College Board said today.

The College Board in 2014 announced it was partnering with Khan Academy to offer the free materials at the same time it said it was redesigning the college admissions test.

The announcement came in response to criticism that low-income students were unable to afford costly test prep materials that gave them an edge. The test overhaul, which was rolled out two years later, eliminated obscure vocabulary words and placed more emphasis on real-world data in subjects like math and science.

For the evaluation, the College Board looked at nearly 250,000 test takers to determine whether they made gains between when they took the PSAT and the SAT. Students who didn't practice at all saw a gain of 60 points, it said. Practicing six to eight hours led to a gain of about 90 points. Overall, it said that 16,000 students saw increases of 200 points or more.

David Coleman, president of the College Board, said the gains made were consistent across race, gender, family income and ethnicity. The testing organization didn't immediately provide reporters with a breakout of that data during a media call this afternoon.


Coleman said he believes the test prep materials go beyond just familiarizing students with the SAT by helping students better learn the material and target points of weakness. 

A bit trite, but worth watching

What "jobs" do educators need help t o solve?

In his new book, Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, Clay Chistensen argues: "Successful innovation can seem like a matter of luck—but it need not be so. Every day, “jobs” arise in people’s lives that they need to resolve. Needing to get one of these jobs done is the mechanism that causes people to “hire” an offering—whether it be a product or a service.."

So what are the jobs in education that school districts want to "hire" services to help resolve:

1. Manage Competencies.  An individual educator or an education entity can create a competency framework that aligns to other source standards documents like the Common Core, TEKS, and Next Generation Science Standards to be used by assessment, content and curriculum management, and student learning record tools.

2. Manage Digital Content and Curriculum.  An individual educator or an education entity can curate a collection of content organized in a logical progression and tagged to learning standards that can be used (via LTI or TCC) by one or more learning management system to support standards-aligned instruction.

3. Deliver Classroom Competency Assessments.  An educator can create and administer a classroom assessment that produces standards-aligned outcome and proficiency level that can be integrated with other assessment results (though xAPI/Caliper).

4. Deliver Interim Benchmark Assessment.  A district assessment office can curate and support classroom administration of common interim benchmark assessments that can be integrated with other assessment results (though xAPI/Caliper).

5. Integrate Embedded Assessment Learning Tools.  An educator, parent, or learner can use an assessment embedded learning tools (e.g. Kahn, IXL, 10 Marks, Accelerated Reader) to supplement and support learning and produce diagnostic assessment data that can be integrated with other assessment results (though xAPI/Caliper).

6. Sustain Access to an Integrated Student Learning Record.  A user can access a view of a student’s learning profile that integrates (though xAPI/Caliper) standards-aligned assessment results (outcomes) from multiple sources including assessment embedded learning tools, interim benchmark assessments, and classroom assessments scored to standard rubrics.

6. Support Personalized Learning.  An educator, learner, parent, or extended learning agent authorized by the parent can access an integrated learning profile that summarizes from multiple assessments instruments the competencies a learner has demonstrated a level of performance and provides access to instructional materials and interventions that are customized to that learner’s profile.

EduBlock - BitCoin for Education

Competency-Based Progression

Competency-Based Progression

Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, NH

1.       We believe that all students can and must learn. In each of our courses, our competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower our students. They address both the application and creation of knowledge and the development of work study practices.

2.       We believe that all teachers must approach grading in the same manner. Grades represent what students learn, not what they earn. We use a four-point letter rubric scale to report both assignment and competency levels of achievement. Numerical “grades” are used only to report final overall course grades so we can compute class rank and GPA for college application purposes. We do not mix academic grades with behavior grades.

3.       We believe that the most significant learning takes place for our students through reflection and reassessment. Our students use the feedback they receive from rubrics to help them understand how to improve their learning.

4.       We believe that our teachers are most effective when they work in teams. We use the Professional Learning Community (PLC) structure to focus our teams on student learning. Over the years, we have found ways to maximize the time allotted for our teachers to collaborate with their PLC’s and this time is available to our teachers every day.

5.       We believe that assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students. Our teachers focus on providing quality aligned instruction and performance assessment practices that are tuned to standards, providing students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery.

6.       We believe that all students must receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs. We recognize that this support cannot always be embedded within the instructional time, and therefore our school has developed a structure to provide this support school-wide at a dedicated time each school day.

7.       We believe that there are many ways for our students to demonstrate mastery of competencies and thus earn credit for their graduation requirements. At our school, we have expanded credit-bearing opportunities far beyond simple traditional classroom courses. Through these alternative pathways, we have started to create a system whereby our students can advance upon demonstrated mastery.

8.       We believe that competency education is rigorous. Rigor is not defined by how much work we assign our students. It is defined by how deeply we engage them in their thinking, understanding, application, and extension of the skills and concepts presented to them through their coursework. We tune our instruction and assessment to the work of Hess’s Rigor Matrix.

9.       We believe that our school’s competency education philosophy aligns perfectly with the competency based systems that colleges and universities are moving to. To that end, we believe that a competency education model is the best way to prepare our students for college and career.

10.   We believe that competency education is ultimately transformed not by the way we report grades or how we build assessments but rather by how we approach instruction in the classroom. Our classroom teachers recognize that quality instruction engages all learners each and every day.

This article was written originally for Competency Works

How My Understanding of Competency Based Education Has Changed Over the Years

by Brian Stack • December 14, 2015 • 0 Comments

Each day as I interact with our teachers and our students, I am reminded to what extent our decision to move to a competency based model has positively influenced our school’s culture and climate, and our philosophy about learning. Today we are graduating students who have never known any other educational system than the one I described above. We spend a great deal of time with our new staff each fall indoctrinating them with our beliefs about teaching and learning. Each day I see small victories from our work that range from students who are being held to higher standards to teacher teams who continue to advance their own understanding and application of the competency education philosophy. I challenge you to ask any of my teachers if they could ever go back to a traditional mindset and I can assure you that you won’t find one who would. We have truly transformed our professional culture into one focused on student learning

Next week, I am excited to be sharing the work that my team and I have done in New Hampshire on competency based education with a group of South Carolina educators as part of the Transform SC institute on Meeting the Needs of Every Student With Competency Based Progression. My preparation for this institute has been an opportunity for me to reflect on what has now been a six year journey with competency education with Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, NH. This past week, our school district was recognized for the second year in a row as a “leader in competency education” by Tom Vander Ark’s organization Getting Smart, noting that Sanborn was one of 30 School Districts Worth Visiting in 2015.

Throughout my journey as a building principal navigating the uncharted waters of a new competency education model, I have shared my thoughts, my reflections, and my research through articles on Competency Works. It has been three years since I wrote one of my first articles entitled Five Things That Changed At My School When We Adopted Competencies. I am often asked how my views of competency education have evolved during my tenure at Sanborn. In that 2012 article, I talked about how our school community decided to “jump into the deep end of the pool” of high school redesign in an effort to provide a better learning experience for our students with a new competency based education model. I noted some big changes for our school community that, at the time, was in its second year of implementation of a competency education model that was adopted by our entire K-12 district. We were a school who was still very much in transition from an old way of thinking to a new one. We were leveraging our grading and reporting structures to ultimately help us transform instruction at the classroom model. Over the years, our understanding of competency education has deepened. We continue to learn more about ourselves each day through our work with our students and each other as professionals. When visitors come to our school and talk with our teachers and our students, here is what they often tell me they take away from their visit.

Personalized Learning

Key Takeaways

• Personalized learning should be defined as the right educational approach for the right student at the right time.


• The growth of personalized learning is highly dependent on the capacity of institutions to improve the collection and analysis of learning data.


• True personalization of online learning will create an educational process similar to what tutoring provides now.

evolllution.comhttp://evolllution.com/programming/teaching-and-learning/improved-analytics-critical-personalization-online-learning/

Improved Analytics Critical to the Personalization of Online Learning

Improved data collection and analysis is critical to the expansion of personalized learning in higher education, which itself is central to the move towards a more hybrid and online postsecondary environment.

The evolution of technology and technological tools over recent years has positively impacted the effectiveness of online learning, which has transformed into a highly engaging, highly integrated platform for students to pursue postsecondary credentials with maximum flexibility. Of course, as with any technology, there is still room for improvement and growth. Online learning has the space to become even more personalized. In this interview, Michael Horn discusses the current state of personalization in the online learning space and shares his thoughts on what the future might hold for online education.


The EvoLLLution (Evo): How truly personalized is online programming today?
Michael Horn (MH): Online learning today is personalized in the sense that it starts to give students control over the pace of their learning and the time when it occurs. It can offer much more flexibility given the asynchronous technologies.
Where there is still a lack of personalization is in the different pathways that students take towards mastery. Certain programs are certainly addressing this and we’re seeing adaptive learning engines like Knewton appear to do some exciting things to better target and personalize for different students. It still feels like we’re really in the early beginnings of the dramatic revolution that we’ve seen in a lot of other technology sectors where really smart recommendation engines come in and assist the student in picking and choosing their unique path.
Evo: What are the most significant limits on the amount of personalization and adaptability that can be introduced into an online course?
MH: In order to really go towards adaptive learning, you need huge numbers of students on your platform and there aren’t a lot of platforms that have that. If you think about it, the ability of Google to personalize advertisements for you, or Amazon to personalize shopping recommendations or Netflix to personalize movies, those are still relatively rudimentary themselves. There’s a limit to these engines and when you talk about learning. What’s exciting is there are potentially a lot more data points available. Every few minutes you can be having interactions that help you understand what a student does and doesn’t understand.
It’s a more complex problem to collect all that data and there are many more variables affecting it. There are also a lot of policies and regulations in place that potentially prohibit the data that we can use to improve this problem quickly. These regulations can inhibit what data we can collect and how we can use it to create the best learning experience at the right time for students.
Evo: Why is personalization of programming so important in terms of student success and outcomes?
MH: It’s related to the value tutoring has to the learning experience. There’s a great deal of evidence that tutoring is actually the best learning opportunity. A tutor can constantly see where a student lacks a certain understanding, or doesn’t quite have the background knowledge about something, and then tweak and tailor the approach and try different things to personalize it for that student. The fundamental insight is that learning is really based on a few things. One is that people are motivated by and passionate about different things. Secondly, we all have different amounts of knowledge that we can manipulate in active memory. Additionally, we all have different levels of background knowledge when we enter a learning experience.
Personalization along those dimensions is critical to unlocking student success.
Evo: To your mind, what might personalization of online courses look like in 20 years?
MH: What we’re going to learn over time is to get much more specific about what sorts of differences there are between learners and which ones have the most impact on learning and learning outcomes.
Right now people are unsure how much adaptive capacity we want in our learning compared with student control and agency. In the future—much as with Google or Amazon where the user has a lot of control but the engine is also automating and making suggestions to enhance that control—you’re going to see similar marriages in learning. You’re going to see a range of approaches for students, where some students go through game-based learning where they’re going through some really exciting simulations or games to master something, and other students they’ll just read a text because for them, they have the background knowledge to access it and it will be a more efficient way to learn.
Evo: What are the biggest roadblocks to realizing this vision of the future?
MH: We need platforms that can collect the data we need and can make better use of data so that we can figure out different ways to serve different learners.  We also need to pay a lot of attention to the learning models themselves. If we use an adaptive platform like Knewton in a traditional classroom, it actually won’t be that useful because the teacher and students are not going at different paces. We need to really shift the learning models themselves, put students at the center and change the way they interact with educators. Competency-based learning is a really important ingredient to this and together, these will be the things that need to fall into place for this to really have the impact that it could.
Evo: As personalization and online courses evolves and grows, do you see the possibility of a higher ed environment emerging where there is no “traditional higher education” left but instead a range of hybrid models?
MH: That’s exactly right. Online learning serves certain people well but if you imagine online learning more as a platform that helps students and teachers find the right path forward in any given subject—whether that’s offline or online—then you can imagine this pervading every single learning experience in the future.
The only places where it might not take root are in those truly specialized subjects for which there are only a few students and teachers capable or interested in studying.
Evo: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the transformation and evolution of personalized online learning and what it will take to create the sort of learning landscape that we’ve been talking about today?
MH: Certain people have cast big doubts in the last couple years on the wisdom of personalized learning. One of the reasons you see pushback on that notion is because there are actually many different definitions for what personalized learning even is.
I have a relatively simple one: it’s the right approach for the right student at the right time. Nothing more nothing less. If people step back from it a little bit and see it a little more simply, it’s easier to understand the power that personalized learning can and should have for all students and realize that it’s something that we would all want in our learning.
This interview has been edited for length.

This is what I am looking for

Now imagine what this might look like in practice. Students come to school and learn through a variety of face-to-face and online activities. As they learn, they are given opportunities to practice and demonstrate their learning and receive feedback on an ongoing basis. When they complete learning activities that require them to use basic factual or procedural knowledge, software evaluates their performance and provides immediate feedback. When they complete learning activities that require deeper levels of understanding, analysis, and critical thinking, the learning platform captures their performance (in video, audio, written, or other formats) and immediately sends it to expert graders who score their work and provide feedback to help the students improveme. Then, as students progress through the platform’s learning activities, the results from both the machine-graded and human-graded standardized assessment items are incorporated to create a complete and robust picture of the students’ mastery of learning standards.

From Thomas Arnett June 12, 2015 post on The key to rigorous online assessments at Christensen Institute

- See more at: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/the-key-to-rigorous-online-assessments/#sthash.fGgg3fIb.dpuf

Reaching Math Students One by One

From NYT

Reaching Math Students One by One

By TINA ROSENBERG

 MARCH 13, 2015 3:21 AM March 13, 2015 3:21 a

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

• Email
• Share
• Tweet
• Save
• More

This story is included with an NYT Opinion subscription.
Learn more »

Like middle school math teachers everywhere, the seventh-grade math teachers at Middle School 88 in the southern part of Brooklyn’s Park Slope have an impossible job. At this high-poverty school, which not long ago was considered failing, students enter with levels of math skills ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade. How can anyone teach to them all?

Middle School 88 in Brooklyn is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology to provide each student with a personalized lesson.

Emily Reisman, who’s been teaching math at M.S. 88 for six years, said that until three years ago, the school taught math the way virtually everyone did. “We would create work sheets at different levels,” she said. “For adding and subtracting fractions, we’d create low, medium and high-level activities for kids to do. The lower level was more straightforward, with a picture. The higher level had word problems.”

Math teachers also try to personalize instruction by grouping students by ability and spending more time with groups that need extra help. They have students work together and teach one another. They offer bonus activities.

But none of these strategies allows students to learn at their individual levels. And that is imperative, because math is cumulative: basic skills are necessary for building advanced ones.

The American educational system, then, creates a permanent math underclass. A student who fails at fourth-grade math will be likely to fall further behind each year. If he is missing essential early skills and concepts, he may spend the rest of his years of school learning nothing at all in math.

“For any subject, any room, it can’t be true that one teacher teaching 30 kids is the best way,” says Joel Rose, an education expert who in 2009 worked for the New York City Department of Education. There, he and Chris Rush, a consultant, developed School of One, a method for math teachers to personalize instruction, and brought it into three middle schools.

Rose and Rush then left the city department and established New Classrooms Innovation Partners, a private nonprofit organization that now works with schools to use Teach to One, a program that evolved from School of One. (It’s still called School of One when used in New York City, where the schools do not pay licensing fees since it originated at the Department of Education.). So far, the program is used in only 30 schools in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., North Carolina and Georgia. Results are positive but not uniformly so. It’s a work in progress – but one with great potential.

M.S. 88 has been using School of One in one of the three academies into which it is divided. The program requires a large-upfront investment. The school knocked down three walls to create a giant classroom, and Ailene Altman Mitchell, the principal, said she also spent $140,000 to buy a laptop for each child, along with screens and tables.

Photo

A School of One pilot program in Manhattan.Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The classroom is the size of four rooms, its divisions marked with shelving and different colored carpet and chairs.   When I visited last month, all four seventh-grade math teachers and some aides circulated, teaching 120 students as a team.

As math class begins, students find their names on airport-style monitors outside the room, which tell them where to go. The different areas are named for high schools in Brooklyn. (Peter Russo, the assistant principal, said that last year the school made the mistake of using New York sports teams. They were dropped when this proved too depressing.)

The monitors also tell the students which of several learning modalities they will use. That day, some answered questions at a computer. A few feet away, others did work sheets in pairs. Five students sat at a table with a teacher, solving equations. At one end of the room, Reisman worked with 23 students on a multiday probability project.

Subject matter varied — simplifying equations, subtracting negative numbers, graphing expressions on a number line, and solving story problems about probability.

At one table, Tianna, Romel and Danielle were hunched over work sheets of probability problems involving gumballs. Work sheets also offered wrong answers, and asked students to identify the mistakes that led to them.

The three were discussing the errors, and endorsed the method. “It engages kids,” said Tianna. “You don’t get bored listening to the teachers. And the computers make it more fun.” Romel and Danielle said they liked working in groups.

M.S. 88 is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology to provide students with a lesson personalized for each.

The first step, now widespread, was the digital lesson, usually a computer game or video. The best-known web provider, Khan Academy, is free. But there are many other sources of digital lessons, from pricey packages created by education companies to rudimentary videos that teachers make at home.

Computers can also administer and grade math quizzes; some choose the next question depending on how the student did on the previous one. If a student tests her mastery with a short exit quiz every day at the end of the lesson, the teacher and student can know quickly whether the student is learning, and how the student learns best.

School of One has both components. New Classrooms has a library of 12,000 lessons, some created by its staff, but most bought à la carte from companies like Pearson and IXL. About a third are online, and the rest are taught live. And every math class ends with each student taking an online quiz that tests whether she has mastered today’s lesson.

But the next step is the real innovation: the educational equivalent of an air traffic control system. Each student’s daily exit quiz is fed into an algorithm, which produces the next day’s schedule for each student and teacher. (Teachers get a preview, and can override the schedule.) If a student has mastered a skill, on to the next one. If not, she gets another day’s instruction, this time through a different modality. (The algorithm is aware of which modalities work best for her.) It’s an enormous departure from traditional teaching.

Justin Reich, a scholar on educational technology at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said other digital learning platforms try to integrate all the pieces, but School of One is the most comprehensive. “Technology has proven to be good at assessing students’ computational abilities very, very quickly,” he said. “But we’ve had a lot of difficulty translating that model of what students know into actionable information.   The information we give teachers is either too coarse or too fine. It’s either ‘Johnny can’t do math’ or ‘here are 186 characteristics on seven dimensions of proficiency’ and the teacher says ‘I can’t look at all that.’ The value proposition of School of One is: by telling you what the next instructional step is, we’ll help you thread between that.“

Many brands of technology save teachers from spending time making up and grading tests. School of One also regroups students and matches them with the just-right lesson. “In a regular classroom, you do the best you could,” said Reisman. “But this does it every night for you.”

Is School of One a timesaver overall? Not necessarily, said Yaron Bohbot, M.S. 88’s math coach, and a former coach with New Classrooms. The collaboration School of One requires takes extra time, he said, but teachers can spend less time on rote work.

RELATED

More From Fixes

Read previous contributions to this series.

Although New Classrooms is one of the few nonprofits in the field, School of One is expensive. (A federal innovation grant still pays for the program in New York’s schools, but that ends this year.) Mitchell estimated that School of One costs some $40,000 a year more than other math tech programs, or about $100 per student. Teachers must also learn to use the program, in an after-school simulation in the spring and training during the summer.

That cost is well worth it if School of One is a much better way to teach math. But we don’t yet know if that’s the case. New Classrooms funded a study carried out by Douglas D. Ready of Teachers College, Columbia University. It evaluated students using a comprehensive test called Measures of Academic Progress, which many schools take at the beginning, the end and sometimes the middle of the school year.

Ready found that in their first year of using School of One, the seven New York City schools made progress statistically similar to the national average. The second year, however, School of One did much better. It added eight more schools, and the collective gains for the 15 schools were 47 percent higher than the national average. They were also highest among the worst-off students, which is exactly what you want to see. M.S. 88 did slightly better than the national average in math improvement the first year, but in the second year did 60 percent better. That’s an extra six months of learning.

Why did schools do better the second year? New Classrooms is always changing the program, and might have improved something important. Also, everything in teaching improves with practice.

School of One isn’t the only program to show impressive results when compared to a national average, said Reich. “But the gains may be in part due to the fact that these are schools that decided to put a lot of time and money into improving their math teaching,” he said. These same programs usually show less impressive results when tested in a randomized controlled trial that compares math gains in schools that use the program to gains in others that want it but will get it later.

The teachers who use it at M.S. 88 (obviously far from a random sample) said they like it. Reisman said her students are more engaged and have more math confidence, and that students sometimes find a learning modality that works where others have failed.

Andy Zimmerman teaches seventh-grade math in all three M.S. 88 academies. He uses School of One in one of them, but has adapted its ideas for use in his other classrooms — sewing together various pieces of technology, something Mitchell called “Frankensteining.”

“Seeing that done in the School of One model, I’m able to wrap my head around it,” said Zimmerman. “But in a classroom where you use lots of different tools, there’s an organizational challenge. For example, Khan and IXL aren’t made to talk to each other.” But School of One, which uses both, “has the value of making using both of these tools simultaneously easier,” Zimmerman said. And only School of One, he said, recommends the appropriate next lesson for each student and organizes the classroom accordingly.

Critics ask a good question: Why should a school try an expensive, disruptive high-tech platform that’s still unproven?   The answer is: in order to prove it. School of One takes comprehensive advantage of technology in ways that let teachers concentrate on teaching. That’s worth getting right. There may be ways to make it cheaper and more effective, but only through further experimentation. As for being disruptive, does anyone defend the current system? “We’re not aspiring to create the least disruptive program,” said Rose. “Our goal is a model that works.”

Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates ontwitter.com/nytimesfixes. To receive e-mail alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here.

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.” She is a co-founder of theSolutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.