Yahoo! Throws Schools a Curve

Will virtual teaching replace classroom teaching?

This week, in Austin, at SXSW, the eponymous Music-cum-everything-Festival, edupreneurs are presenting, attending, and probably drinking-a-lot-at seminars.  (I hyphenated that last bit so it would work as a noun in the series.  I don’t think it worked.  But that’s such a good way to attend an education seminar.  I’ve heard.) At one of these seminars at SXSW, the founders of virtual classroom biz standouts InstaEDU, Udemy, and Course Hero will be discussing the future of online education.  These companies are all vying for the opportunity to shape the future of how—and where—students learn.

There’s a lot of excitement (and fear) in schools about the future use of technology in education.  The impact of innovation could (and, I think, most definitely will) dramatically change our national school landscape.  Union reps, politicians, property owners and—always last and always least—teachers are all very interested how the virtual classroom will continue to improve or diminish instruction.

SXSW.edu, as the Fest is called, comes one week after Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer announced that there would be no more telecommuting at her company—and it set the blogosphere aflutter.  Her claim, basically:  distance working ain’t working out so good.  So, naturally, I wondered about the serendipity of it all. Can online classrooms—teleteaching/telelearning—replace the classroom, brick and mortar stuff, that teachers have been doing since Socrates?  If Mayer thinks that Yahoo!’s productivity is a victim of distance-working, might she also think that school’s productivity will also suffer with distance-teaching? 

Teleteaching and Telelearning:  The State of the Art

SXSW.edu, sponsored and backed by Bill and Melinda Gates (which means something politically, for those of you keep track), will be exploring how technology is already impacting pedagogy.  The seminars this week include a particular focus on what I call “teleteaching:” when teachers record lessons or lectures and distribute them online. Teachers have been offering online education for years, of course, but teleteaching seems poised to become a real competitor to “in the classroom” teaching.

Last year, Stanford University professor Daphne Koller got a lot of press when she rolled out Coursera.org at TEDGlobal 2012. The site offers “online course enrollment” in MOOC's from places like Standford, Harvard, and Yale—if you’ve ever heard of such places. You can get credit from these schools without ever going into any classroom at all—a big deal given some of those university names.  Coursera’s website boasts all kinds of wonderful things, mostly the democratization of education.  That’s a good thing.  But do students learn? 

Colleges, high schools, and elementary schools across the country have been expanding their online campuses for years, of course—but rarely as a complete replacement of actual classroom experience.  A couple of years ago, TED shined a spotlight on online teleteaching pioneer Kahn Academy (another Gates beneficiary). At Kahn, students download specific lessons on things such as Algebra, History, and Chemistry. Kahn seems to be working towards the supplemental rather than replacement model.  It has been collaborating with schools across the country, helping teachers “flip” the classroom: the students teach themselves at home with the online instruction then come to the classroom for practice and specific instruction from the actual teacher.  This is right up my alley-- and I have spent some time on Kahn's website.  The model looks pretty good and where I'd put my money for where things are headed.

But does the online instruction work?  The University of Phoenix has long been the butt of many jokes—but it’s been there for years, offering online courses. People get degrees from there and, I suppose, opportunities and raises from the accreditation.  It ain’t Harvard, but a degree is a degree.  But let’s get to the nitty gritty:  do people learn from a virtual instructor?  A couple of years ago, I took an online driving course to lower my car insurance.  Did it make me a better driver?  Heck, I don’t know. 

For years, the internet has been offering free education on places like YouTube and eHow. Many of my students are teaching themselves using online courses of all sorts, learning everything from how to play songs or do dance steps to how to write a better analytical essay.  I have seen students teach themselves ukulele on YouTube.  I’ve taught myself how to chop vegetables, install lights, and how to order grilled meat in Rio during Carnival. So the argument for online video instruction certainly has a foothold in the practical world. 

The Virtual Classroom Is Here To Stay

The lingering question in EVERY conversation about innovation in education is: does this stuff work?  The problem is that there isn’t enough data that we can reliably crunch to lean one way or the other.  But it doesn’t matter.  Like so many other changes in education made in the last 20-30 years (the ubiquity of standardized tests, the use of teacher evaluations, experiments with the length of a class period), it doesn’t matter if it works.  It only matters if people (politicians, school boards, customers, etc) buy into it.

And that’s why this is just more evidence that edupreneurship is the future of education.  Teachers need to think like entrepreneurs because the market forces simply win the day.  As a supporter of public education, it’s a tricky reality to get my head around.  But teachers MUST be on the ground floor of innovations like virtual instruction.  We need to be making the content, testing techniques and strategies, and adapting our models for online consumption.

Will Yahoo!’s Mayer be seen as a visionary for her call for a return to the workplace?  In the end, I think not.  She’s trying to tighten a ship and send a signal to her company—but I’m sure that Yahoo! will still retain a strong telecommuting model.  The future will have us working everywhere, connected online.  Heck, that’s the way it is now.

Online education is a natural extension of the Socratic model:  students learn best when they are exploring things and teaching themselves. Socrates famously used questions. Today, and especially tomorrow, we’ll most certainly be asking most of our questions online.

My hope? That good teachers will be the ones running the sites, making the videos, and managing the process.

 Citations:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2013/02/27/get-to-the-office-or-get-out-why-marissa-mayer-has-made-a-smart-move/

http://www.sxswedu.com/

http://blog.ted.com/2012/07/18/completely-free-online-classes-coursera-org-now-offering-courses-from-14-top-colleges/

America's Got Talent

Exxon Knows Teachers

I’ll bet you’ve seen the Exxon Mobil commercials that are about teachers.  On standardized math and science tests, according to the commercials, students in the US are faring poorly against those from other countries.  In the New York television market, I saw the spot at least a dozen times in November and December.

Pretty amazing, really:  good advertising IS education. 

By almost any measure, American public schooling is in trouble.

We need better teachers—almost everyone agrees on this point.  How to get and keep great teachers, however, remains a sticky wicket.  And—it’s the single most important problem plaguing education.

Exxon’s point appears to be that we need better training for teachers.  Apparently, they've put some money into doing it, too, which is commendable, even if you're not crazy about that company.  Again, a lot of people seem to agree about that—I certainly do.  I have a lot of experience in teacher training:  I've been through graduate programs, seminars, professional development, staff meetings... I've seen what people in my profession are doing to train us.  It is not good.  I hate to say it but, if you're a teacher reading my blog, you know what I'm saying.  Every once in a while, you actually learn something in PD.  But most of the time, it is dismal parody of itself.  It's bad teaching about good teaching.  It'd be funny it weren't so bloody sad or frustrating.

The Billion Dollar Question

How do you train a teacher into being a great teacher?

My answer is simple:  you can’t, basically.  Or, at least, it takes a really motivated person to do it.  I talk about it in detail in an earlier article "The Great Ones" which you should read right now.  Go ahead, I'll wait here.

You can help a lousy teacher become less lousy. With a lot of work, you can take a decent teacher and make them better, certainly.  But you can’t-- without an incredible amount of work in a culture that is really hard to build-- make any old person a great teacher.   It’s like thinking you can take the bassist of any band and make him into Paul McCartney.  Or taking a decent pitcher from a team in the majors and make him into Babe Ruth.  It's incredibly difficult to make someone great at anything. 

So where are all of the great teachers?  Some of them are in the classrooms.  But I’m willing to bet there are many, many more who aren’t teachers by trade.  They’re making money doing something else.

The bottom line:  we don’t have a skill problem.  We have a talent problem.  Exxon Mobil, I'm glad you want to help out teachers.  You guys over at your company know how to attract talent, right?  I'm not trying to be cute or anything, but it's not complicated.  

Mostly, it's just expensive.  

School Yourself

The biggest obstacle isn't a reality:  it's a dream

Here's the old model, the time-tested, incredibly persistent concept of "school:"
The teacher teaches the student.

It's simple, easy to understand, and has the ring of truth.  We say things like "he taught me so much!" or "I learned so much from her."  The teacher is a vending machine, a talking textbook, a knowledge dispenser. We keep the wisdom and dole it out.

As a teacher, I can tell you:  this model works-- less than half of the time.  The days it works are sublime:  you lecture, digress, and expound. Your students sit in the glow of your brilliance, they eat it up, light bulbs go on, and the music of instruction plays like a street fiddler in the square.  You make the magic.

But when that ain't working for you, when the students are bored, lost, or detached-- these are awful teacher moments.   Your students loll in the harsh light of your artificial sun, they list in their seats, darkness pervades, and the clatter of the lecture plays like a rusty chain on the pavement.

The "Great Teacher" Fantasy
Often, teachers of teachers claim to want to debunk this model.  The better part of professional development that I have seen in the last 10 years as a teacher seems to be grounded in the idea that the teacher should not be the "Sage On the Stage."  I swear, I hear that stuff all the time in staff meetings.  It kills me because I don't think anyone really belives it.  When we talk about a great teacher, we often talk about this brilliant genius around whom the classroom orbits. I loved Dead Poets Society and Stand and Deliver.  To some extent, I dreamed of being those guys when I started my career.

This old model is the problem, of course.  It's those dream days of magic teaching that encumber and bewitch us.  We calculate success in the classroom as a measure of the proximity to this idealistic model.  The perfect becomes the enemy to everything else.

Teachers and schools haven't invented this old blanket, however.  It's deep in our collective thought about learning.  We live in a Guru culture.  We celebrate the "amazing teachers" in movies and in books.  Parents "are the most important teachers" of their children.  Older siblings "teach" their younger siblings.  We've even created our computer models around it.  Data is "downloaded" from an original source.  It's "copied." Knowledge is not created-- it's ctrl C then ctrl V.  Real artificial intelligence remains the provence of science fiction because we don't put a high premium on the efficacy of anyone teaching herself.  Once computers are built to teach themselves, it'll be a whole new movie, baby.  But we don't really know how to do that-- because we don't do much of it with each other.

That awesome teacher moment-- that's what we crave.  But it simply doesn't happen often enough-- even for the great teachers.

There's a more effective model, of course: a model that is, arguably, even more recognizable. It's a model that has founded just about every bit of learning ever done by any one.  It's hidden under the old model, nearly unsung in our public discourse about education despite its ubiquity in "real life" applications.

The Better Model
Student teaches himself knowledge.
Teacher helps when and where necessary.

First time parents have no teachers.  Brain surgeons must hold the scalpels alone on a first surgery.  Nobody could teach Mick Jagger how to sing, Warren Buffet how to invest, Oprah Winfrey how to produce, Michael Phelps how to swim, or you how to do whatever it is YOU are good at.  Of course, people helped Mick and Warren and Oprah and the rest-- but no one taught them-- at least, not in the traditional sense.  They taught themselves.  Their mentors were there when and/or where needed.  As have been all the great teachers in your life.

Heck, you taught yourself language.  How to walk.  Do you ever think about how your brain must work for that to have happened?  For it to happen to everyone, everywhere, in every culture around the world?

This old model needs a real challenge, especially as our cultural and political conversations about good teaching begin to gain more and more traction. It's blotting out the light and our schools-- and our culture-- continues to whither under its shiny promise of the "better teacher."

When on the job, the best teachers are barely there.  They elegantly and efficiently drop in and out of the learning process.  They pay attention, make it about the students, and constantly convince/inspire/trick students into teaching themselves.

In a world of Teaching Specialists, we need teachers need to be Specialists in How Teach Oneself.  We need teachers who teach people to not need teachers.

Complicated, indeed.

Too Many Tickets

Keep the qualifiable and the quantifiable separate

The best thing about Lulu's isn't the free pizza, although the pizza is pretty good.

You buy a drink, you get a freshly baked, sandwich-plate-sized pizza. It's NY dough, so it's chewy and crusty, the way God wants it to be. The sauce might be a little tart and the cheese is just ok, but the toppings are only a dollar, so why are you complaining? Just get the pepperoni and pineapple and be happy.

But, no, the best thing about Lulu’s is the skylight. It's a dive bar WITH A SKYLIGHT. I know: a true dive, by definition, cannot be improved with light, right? Wrong. Somehow that light, filtered through a metal grate and hanging plants, coupled with the smell of fresh pizza, makes Lulu's atmospheric and lovely. They also have a great selection of beer and booze.  It's one of my favorite bars in Brooklyn.

Don't go. I don't want it to get crowded.

Anyway, sitting in there this beautiful mid-December afternoon, I got a glimpse of one of the things that’s broken in our schools.

Pizza Tickets:  A Parable 

But, for the moment, back to the pizza.  Here's how it works:

1. you buy a drink then get a ticket for free pizza
2. take that ticket to the pizza kitchen window and order a pizza
3. toppings? pay the pizza guy when you order

Easy, right? Simple, understated, and efficient.

That is, until a manager decided that having more “transparency” in the system would make it work better.

Now: First two steps are the same.  If you want toppings, then

4. you have to buy toppings tickets from the bar
5. bring the toppings tickets to the pizza guy

What’s happened?  It's crazy. I saw the harried bartender explain the system over and over to frustrated customers who walked back and forth between the bar and the pizza window. I'd hate to see it when things get busy at Lulu's.

Listen, it's a ridiculous example, I know. But it's illustrative of the stupid cost of manager-based systems in place of field-worker-based systems.  You’ve seen it a hundred times.  The focus on the manager makes things worse.

Managers:  It’s the Quality, Stupid

States across the country, under the federal mandates of Race To the Top, are in the process of creating and executing “teacher evaluations.” As people everywhere debate the merits of these evaluations, few people are spending any time talking about what these instruments actually value. Every single evaluation model I've looked at is a manager-based evaluation.

The problem? Managers-- in so many fields-- don't actually do the work of those that they evaluate. They only monitor, evaluate, and regulate their underlings. Managers create regulations-- like topping tickets-- because they don't KNOW what's going on. They need to have numbers to PROVE what's going on.

Subsequently, manager-based evaluation tends to be skewed towards things that can be quantified. Teachers are to be evaluated largely by managers looking for good numbers-- which is the central premise of “teacher evaluation.”  

There is no better example of this flaw than the "Value Added" Model.  At its best, the VA models help pinpoint really good and really bad teachers.  That's good-- but a very small set in a system that worships bell curve models, as explained by the National Council on Teacher Quality in their study of DCPS (District of Columbia Public School) teachers in 2010.  At its worst, and most common, it incentivizes teachers to make the students appear statistically stupid at the beginning of the year in order to show "growth."  

You know what happens to good teachers when they get incentivized to make their students appear stupid?  They get really demoralized.  And they stop thinking about teaching in favor of thinking about avoiding negative numbers. Teachers stop focusing on quality and start focusing on quantity. 

Teachers Should Evaluate Teachers

It's amazing to me that it's radical to say “teacher evaluation should be done by teachers.” The teachers who evaluate other teachers should be informed by data collected from managers, test-scores, peers, and student feedback.  Teacher evaluators would, as workers in the field, should give qualitative evaluations, not quantitative evaluations.

What do I say to all of those school managers (administrators)? Order the ingredients, keep the shop running, and look out for safety. Everything else—well, no offense, but it’s not really your job.  Keep those extra tickets to yourself. 

Citation:

http://www.nctq.org/p/tqb/viewStory.jsp?id=19984

Theatre, the Beautiful

My director's notes to my high school's production of 1776.

This is the story of who we are.

Every person has a birth story. Your parents, no matter how present or involved after you were born, have a tale of how you came to be. The day you were born, a group of people gathered to help make it so, and that story remains a part of the great archive of everything in the history of the world.

Every culture has a birth story, too.  The creation of the United States is a Great Story of “Almost.”  It almost didn’t happen.  In fact, when you take the time to study the historical record, it’s easy to see that it probably shouldn’t have happened.

The colonists simply fought with each other too much.

In places like Facebook, Twitter, and in the media, the arguments of this past Presidential election are, actually, not unlike the kind had by the colonists 200 years ago. What should the government be in charge of?  How powerful should political officials be?  What should and shouldn’t taxes pay for?  These fundamental questions of our nation are enduring and essential; your kids and your kid’s kids will likely be arguing them still.

Our Great Story of Almost added a chapter last week with the reelection of President Barack Obama. When we vote, argue, serve our nation, we are doing the same work as those who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Its future chapters will be written in the courage, strength, fears, and resolve of those of us who continue to pick up the legacy of the Founders of our Nation.

As I write this amidst the broken timbers, shredded power lines, and long gas queues of the wake of Hurricane Sandy, I can’t help but see our huddled community as not very different than that of the colonists. We are beset by challenges, split by ideology, and worried about the unknowable future. It’s been a challenging and bleak Autumn for many of us here on the Island.

But there is a hope. The students in 1776 have pulled together and endured. They lost power, hot water, stability, and Halloween. But they met in living rooms to run lines, practice dance steps and harmonies, and support each other. They’ve learned how to fix broken set pieces, verify historical facts about powdered wigs and military dispatches, and remain strong in the face of challenge.

These students are our colonists to the future.  From what I have seen in these past weeks of trial and tribulation, our American future looks bright.

We will endure.

Welcome to the Masquers’ 50^th Anniversary Season: The Season of Power.

Performances:

Friday November 16, 730pm

Saturday, November 17, 2 and 730pm

North Shore High School

Glen Head, NY

CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS

northshoreartsangels.org

Republican (Media) Wins!

“Perhaps because Fox continued to dominate the sector both in audience and financial terms, it did not change its formula or experiment with new methods of content delivery.”

(The Pew Research Center, State of the News Media 2012).

In the wake of the election, partisans and pundits on both sides have been opining about what went wrong for Republicans. An emerging narrative in the media is that the Republican Party must change.  From MSNBC to FOX to CNN to The NY Times to The Wall Street Journal, pundits have been calling this election a “wake up call” for the GOP. The electorate has changed, demographically, and the Republican agenda simply isn’t representing a majority any more.

Normally, when an electorate shows its colors on election day, political parties look at the results in order to inform tactical decisions.  New strategies are constructed; corrections and alterations are made.

But I think the Republicans will have a hard time changing because of the incredible financial success of Right-leaning media companies. The financial success of a place like FOX News speaks to its dominance of its own market-share: members of the Republican Party. The Republican Party no longer seems to be led by politicians; it seems to be led by vendors selling product. I know this is a broad simplification—but my point is logistical. I don’t think Republicans are stupid. I think the Party has bought into an incredibly profitable, media business model.

When Balance Becomes The Enemy

Right-leaning media sources such as FOX News have inoculated themselves to correction (or even reflection) because sources like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly encourage their audiences to discredit and disbelieve any other news source.

According to many of the loudest on the Right, every other bit of media is liberal, wrong, and/or downright deceitful.

This is not a small deal. Imagine having a doctor who not only tells you that all other doctors aren’t as good, but that all other doctors are also liars.  What happens when another doctor has a treatment that you actually NEED?  You would be tempted to believe that no one else could help you. 

There's no better evidence than this election.  Many of my Republican friends were SHOCKED that Obama won.  They were absolutely flummoxed.  That’s because somewhere in the past 4-8 years, the core of the Republican Party switched from being members of a party into members of a market.  Right-leaning media audiences are huge and loyal, but they have bought more than the news. Customers have not bought the “most trusted” news; they've bought the ONLY trusted news of the Republican Party.

The News Isn’t Good

Can you blame FOX News, Limbaugh, or the rest?  They have an incredibly profitable business model. From a success point of view, you have to admire them. They have, literally, destroyed the competition. But the collateral damage is to the Republican Party-- and to political debate itself.  

With profits like FOX's, can the rest of the press far behind? 

The day after election night on FOX’s "The O’Reilly Factor," the show posted a fresh poll of their own viewers, asking “Do you believe 'The Factor' has been fair covering the election?”  'The Factor' is the show that had FoxNews regulars (and Republican insiders) such as Charles Krauthammer, Dick Morris, and Karl Rove on the day before the election—all who predicted a Romney win.  On 11/06,  O’Reilly himself said, “Romney will win Florida, I just don’t know about Ohio.”

80% of their audience said “Yes, 'The Factor' had provided fair coverage."

You can’t make a happy toothpaste brusher change his toothpaste.  And until wildly successful news sources such as FOX News and Limbaugh fail as businesses, the Republican Party doesn’t look like it's going to change. There's just too much money to be made.

And that’s bad news for everyone-- especially Republicans. 

image credits: The Pew Research Center, ABC News, and FOX News