I have been an educator for 32 years. Yet, to this day the most powerful experience I have ever had as a teacher was in the early 1980s. It involves otherwise juvenile alternative high school students behaving like adults, when given the chance.
First, a bit of background. When I showed up at the alternative high school to do my student teaching in the early 1980s, I was an anomaly. I had already been working with a mini-computer (the forerunner of the micro-computer) for two years. I had been programming, word processing, and even installing terminals in malls and office buildings to solicit input about local issues.
Thanks to a principal with vision, the alternative high school had one of the first microcomputers to be truly useful and lovable: the Apple IIe. It wasn’t being used much, as if the alternative high school had been waiting for me to arrive to bring it to life. I immediately started spending my days with students helping them get the most from this amazing new machine.
The kids at the alternative high school were “the bad kids.” No doubt some of them were – bad, that is – but to me they were basically bored to distraction. Distraction led to less than social behavior. And in fact, they were often difficult, annoying adolescents who had honed their skills of authority defiance to a great degree. Yet, I persevered, despite the challenges.
Then we went to the university, and something amazing happened. I was also teaching for the university at the time, and was part of a grant that brought the same “bad kids” out to the university as part of a computer training program. So there I was, working with the same students in both locations, at the local alternative high school, and at the university computer lab. And what I experienced had to be seen to be believed.
While at the university, the kids of the alternative high school behaved like adults. When they returned to the alternative high school, they reverted to being “bad kids,” utterly, totally. The phrase night and day comes to mind. It was so clear and predictable, it was as if someone were flipping a switch.
I encouraged an adult environment at the university when, on the first day, one of the students asked if he could go to the bathroom. My response to his question was probably one of the most important things I have ever said to a group of students: “You may not go to the bathroom where you are sitting, but feel free to use the men’s room down the hall. Look, everyone, this is a university. Asking if you can go to the bathroom is more information than anyone needs to know. If you need to go do something, go do something. We don’t use hall passes here. We use our own sense of responsibility to guide what we do. Come and go as you need to.”
OMG. The look on their faces seemed to signal that this was their first taste of adulthood. And they rose to the occasion and behaved like adults, utterly, totally. Every problem I had with them at the alternative high school evaporated. Conversation was more informed. They were more helpful. They got into their work. I spent zero time on being a disciplinarian. I remember thinking to myself, can it be this simple- treat them like adults, and they grow up?
Consider this an introduction to the following article from Eschool News. I think they have the right idea.
—J.O.
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Laptops, Personalized Learning Replace Lectures in Schools
June 21st, 2012
From wire service reports
www.eschoolnews.com
Last year, Kim Crosby spent about 80 percent of her class time teaching math concepts at Waukesha STEM Academy in Wisconsin. For the other 20 percent, she helped students individually.
This year, that time was reversed: 80 percent of her class time was spent moving from student to student; about one-fifth continued to be a standard lecture format. The rest of the direct-instruction materials she wanted students to see, she assigned them to watch or read at home.
“To me, this makes more sense,” Crosby said.
When it comes to challenging traditional ideas about how schools should operate, this two-year-old charter school is building a reputation with a curriculum that focuses on science, technology, engineering, and math, and where student schedules can change every day.
Students choose when they want to eat and when they want to work during a 60-minute lunch, and they randomly can be found working in groups behind the reception desk—or in the teachers lounge.
It might sound like too much freedom for middle-schoolers, but not to Principal Ryan Krohn.
“If we want kids to act like adults and be responsible and come up with ideas and manage their time,” he said, “why do we continue to tell them exactly what to do and expect them to do it in the same way and at the same time as everyone else?”
Krohn is part of a growing network of educators in Wisconsin and across the nation calling for learning environments that are less lecture-driven and more collaborative. They want children to think better for themselves. They believe teachers must use technology in more sophisticated ways to advance learning. They believe the immediate payoff is more engagement. The long-term goal: higher achievement.
Dramatic spending cuts, calls from taxpayers for greater efficiency, and rapidly evolving technology are propelling such ideas forward and causing more people to question the seemingly immutable norms of traditional schooling:
Why are classes still largely structured around lecturing, when research shows learners often retain information better through writing about it or explaining it, with feedback?
Why do schools largely group children by similar age instead of similar ability?
Why is memorization and fact-regurgitation so heavily valued when school leaders and employers say they want greater problem solving and critical thinking skills from graduates?
Promising opportunities
New technologies offer promising opportunities for schools to move away from the factory-style instruction model to one where learning plans are customized for each student—something already common in special education but largely absent from the mainstream.
Coined “personalized learning,” the approach is being tested with specific populations of students in many schools and implemented with all students in places such as Waukesha’s STEM Academy.
“If we want kids to act like adults ... why do we continue to tell them exactly what to do and expect them to do it in the same way and at the same time as everyone else?”
In some schools, personalized learning aligns with a blended learning approach that mixes face-to-face teaching with online instruction.
In a time of reduced resources, some advocates say blended learning also could allow teachers in some cases to handle larger class sizes, particularly if teachers combine their classes and/or receive support from lower-paid aides or even older students. What that could mean for the quality of instruction long-term remains unknown.
The efforts in southeastern Wisconsin are being spearheaded largely by Cooperative Educational Services Agency No. 1 in Pewaukee, one of many state-funded agencies around Wisconsin that support local school districts.
Jim Rickabaugh, the former superintendent of Whitefish Bay Schools, has launched The Institute at CESA 1, an initiative aimed at helping districts evangelize the concept of customized education through the use of technology and by teaching students to advocate for themselves, research effectively, and take ownership of their own learning.
The movement has nationwide traction, and companies are offering sophisticated learning tools that teachers can incorporate to make instruction more customized.
These new models have generated excitement among early adopters, but they don’t have complete consensus.
“We’re trying to honor people’s need for this legacy model of education but also pursue this new educational model, and it’s caused tension,” said Theresa Gennerman, principal of Kettle Moraine Middle School. “We’ve got this perfect storm: the political climate, declining enrollment, less money for schools, and the kids, who are all asking for it. But we’re also trying to exist in this old model. Many parents still want to see ‘Kettle Moraine High School’ on their child’s diploma.”
So the district this year created two new charter schools within Kettle Moraine High School: one focused on global issues, the other on the arts. The charter-school students still might take classes in the “legacy” school—KMHS proper—but spend much of their time working independently or in groups on projects in their core subjects through the charter school.
When it comes to the effectiveness of online instruction, most research on computer-based learning vs. traditional instruction has been conducted at the university level, not in K-12 education, said Gary Miron, an expert in education technology research at Western Michigan University.
Teachers who already use more technology in their teaching—such as the suite of free Google Apps for Education or ALEKS, a popular online math program—find value in the tools. But little independent academic research is available to judge the quality of one program over another.
What is clear, at least to Miron, is that research suggests well-executed project-based learning builds higher-level thinking skills in students, and that an engaging teacher—technology or no technology—is essential.
Rickabaugh is guided by the belief that the current system of schooling is not set up to educate kids at high levels; it’s set up to teach to the middle and to reward those who memorize and recall facts well. The system is not good at accommodating those who don’t learn well in the traditional fashion, and those are often the students who disengage, fall behind, and cost more money to remediate.
As technology matures and educators become more skilled at applying it, Rickabaugh believes that personalizing education will become the new standard. Not as a boutique charter-school program. Not as a route for the gifted and talented. But as the new normal.
“We need to make a fundamental shift to customized learning plans for each student, which are attached to world-class standards and which move at a pace that challenge but don’t discourage them,” Rickabaugh said. “We have technologies available to us now that allow this to happen.”
Challenging traditional ideas
At STEM Academy, Krohn spent a year studying how to challenge the traditional ideas people had about how children need to be taught.
He questioned everything from class design to curriculum. Why do students have to do everything at the same time—from calisthenics in gym to eating lunch together? What if all the teachers in a grade level collaborated on their curriculum? What if students didn’t have set schedules every day? What would bringing career professionals into the building, on a near-daily basis, do for students? Why do students need to be in a classroom to work? Could they be more productive if they worked elsewhere in the school?
Krohn developed a vision, which was supported by the district and a charter school planning grant from the state. One thing was immediately clear: His kids would need online access all the time. The school is wireless. Every student is issued a laptop, their assignments and work accessible on the internet.
Teachers meet as a grade-level team to design projects with an overarching theme, with applicable content areas for each subject. Art and business teachers also align their curricula with core classes.
As an example, the sixth grade started a baseball unit with a field trip to Miller Park. When they got back, a multiweek study of baseball across subject lines ensued, including business-class projects on marketing baseball, a science project on the force in a swing, and math practice that related to calculating surface area, volume, and statistics.
Students spend much more of the day working in groups to find the answers to questions and explaining concepts to their friends, while teachers provide one-on-one or group support.
Krohn also thought he could redesign lunchtime to be more effective and engaging for students.
While many schools offer a scant 20 minutes, the middle-schoolers have a full hour to eat when they want and do work for the other part of the time. Teachers split the hour: Half eat first and offer assistance to students or an extracurricular activity the second part of the period; the other half eat second.
Since the opening of the school, Krohn has paid close attention to STEM Academy students’ scores on an assessment known as the Measures of Academic Progress, which is taken three times during the school year. So far, students appear to be advancing in ways that are similar or better than what would be expected in a traditional public school.
And that’s with the school still working out a number of bugs.
“To go from teachers thinking that we needed to check kids in and out of lunch ... to kids being able to monitor themselves and advocate for themselves as learners, that’s a big—and we think, valuable—shift.”
“To go from teachers thinking that we needed to check kids in and out of lunch and assign them seats in the lunchroom to kids being able to monitor themselves and advocate for themselves as learners, that’s a big—and we think, valuable—shift,” Krohn said.
Not just charter schools
Charter schools such as Waukesha STEM Academy are set up to be innovative and to experiment with curriculum, but the personalized-learning concept has been adopted with positive feedback at a variety of other traditional suburban school districts.
Milwaukee Public Schools, Racine, and Kenosha also are teaming up to share best practices on incorporating personalized learning into their programs.
A growing number of area school districts are modifying math instruction through the use of an online math program known as ALEKS. The program allows students to move at their own pace through subjects such as algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, which is coupled with varying degrees of teacher intervention. Through their dashboard, teachers can see where children are advancing, getting stuck, or trying multiple times to do a problem and failing.
In Pewaukee’s Asa Clark Middle School, a double-sized room serves as the math lab for up to 40 or 50 students per period.
At least two teachers, a paraprofessional, and a high school helper work the room with one-on-one support or small group lessons. The atmosphere is louder than a usual class—while a teacher is doing a small-group lesson in one corner, students elsewhere in the class might question each other about problems or talk to another teacher individually.
Math teacher Tiffany Grandlich holds regular conferences with students—the length and frequency determined by how well that student is progressing—to establish goals.
“The key is having it personalized to each child,” she explained. “Some students say, ‘I’m good, I can check in with you again in three weeks,’ while other kids have to check in with me every day. I’m seeing kids who hated math now say they don’t mind it.”
Grandlich also was surprised to see the span of ability of her students, who normally would have been able to work up only through honors algebra in a traditional class.
Now she has some students who have moved ahead to Algebra II, or advanced algebra in high school. Some kids enter her class at a fourth-grade level and need lots of personal attention. Grandlich spends extra time with these students to help them advance as much as possible.
Across the hallway from the math lab, another Asa Clark experiment is challenging the traditional school model.
The program, called Academy 21, allows participating seventh- and eighth-graders to study English, science, social studies, and math through independent projects while overseen by two full-time advisers. The lab space is set up like a professional office for kids, complete with small cubicles that students decorate with photos and calendars.
Instead of going to traditional classes, students work with advisers to design their own projects that meet state curriculum standards. Students do six hours of Academy every two days, including utilizing the math lab for help if they need it, and they rejoin their peers for traditional classes such as physical education and Spanish.
Students have project management schedules—deadlines to hit, a learning log, and a digital portfolio of work to accomplish. All of it is spelled out in Google documents shared between the Academy 21 advisers and students.
One of those advisers, Scott Roehl, used to teach five conventional science classes each day. Now, his days are spent conferencing with students and teaching them one-on-one when they hit a concept for which they need direct instruction.
“So much of this is about rethinking education and our educational philosophy,” Roehl said. “This works for students who want to take ownership of their learning. They create a task analysis and outline what skills they need to accomplish—it mirrors what the private sector has been asking us to do for years.”
Roehl and others acknowledge that this style of learning is not for everyone. Some students cannot handle the independence and need to be pushed along with higher levels of direct instruction.
But for those who don’t, many possibilities suddenly emerge.
On one recent afternoon, seventh-graders Kiley Fetherston, Kendall Schoenike, and Sydney Wagner sat around a table in the Academy 21 room. Fetherston was working on a project about nuclear energy. Schoenike was determined to organize a field trip to the zoo and was researching how to assemble a project that would hit the required curriculum standards in science and English.
“You have to assign yourself homework,” she said. “We have deadlines, and we have to estimate how much time we think everything will take.”
They all agreed: This is something new, and yes, their parents initially were perplexed by the lack of familiar worksheets and traditional homework. And by how they earned their grade: through credits given by their advisers based on time on task and product completed.
Teacher’s role changing
Many of the personalized learning projects in area schools have hinged on connecting students with laptops so they can be plugged in anytime, anywhere.
But the changing role of the teacher also has been emphasized at Cudahy High School.
“Technology itself isn’t the magic bullet,” said Greg Molzahn, Cudahy High’s English and technology teacher. “But it allows me to get more one-on-one time with kids.”
Molzahn uses a vast array of web tools available for free through Google to round out his AP literature and language classes. Students share documents online, and Molzahn writes assessment questions right onto a web portal.
Cudahy High School math teacher Bill Kujawa has also modified his curriculum to reflect technology and adopt a personalized schedule that fits his and his students’ lives. He gives students online video tutorials to watch for math, then follows up with them in an online space to discuss. The ability to do that from a remote location allows Kujawa the freedom to teach at school from 7 a.m. to noon every day, then spend noon to 3 p.m. at home with his young children.
He’s often back online, teaching and working with students in the evening between 8 and 10 p.m.—the time when many students are doing homework and have the most questions.
Cudahy Superintendent Jim Heiden said the modifications they’ve made to allow more flexibility in courses for students have required some investment in new technology.
But Heiden believes the district can’t afford not to teach in ways that are more flexible and more customized for teachers and students.
“We’re a business, and if we want to be vibrant 15 years from now, we need to figure out what to do to attract kids to learning and to challenge them,” Heiden said.