LeaderTalk

Immigrants, Natives, Elders

About 20 years ago Dow Chemical Canada was benchmarked against Motorola then as now a corporate paragon. At the end of the week the conclusion was that Dow could never aspire to match Motorola's performance. The reason was that Dow's top management did not understand technology and would therefore be at the mercy of its technological wonks in making decisions. Since all decisions would involve a technological component, chance not reason would rule.

I have thought about this story often through the years. Scott recently raised the question about whether educational leaders needed to be technologically literate. In my opinion it depends. If you are serious about educating students for a future the exact nature of which none of us knows then the answer is yes. Since Dow measured itself against Motorola, the need for this kind of knowledge has grown and it will continue to grow.

Mark Prensky has introduced a distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants. I believe Don Tapscott has also divided the field in a similar way. That the distinction is not exhaustive does not mitigate its usefullness. I think there are a few educators, however, who while they did not grow up immersed in technology, get technology in a way that may be precisely what is needed. These people are around and in many industries they have become ascendant. They are like the accountants of the fifties and sixties who became CEO's of major corporations. They were excellent bean counters who were able to see the ways in which beans could be employed to make their companies better.

There are these people in our business as well. I see myself as one. I had email in the very early 90's and used gopher and lynx, the latter a text-based front end on the early web. I read the writings of Louis Schmeir and participated in Global Schoolhouse Projects. In 1994 I travelled to Swarthmore College to work with the originators of the Math Forum still one of the best math sites (now located at Drexel U.). Our project involved building a geometry website that we could look at in a new program called Mosaic.

We were supposed to be spending our time the first few days learning the Internet protocols: mail, ftp, gopher, http, etc. But none of us could stop ourselves from launching Mosaic and taking a look around at the first graphical front end on the web. Our instructors, Annie Fetter and Stephen Weimar among them, were equally enamoured.

So I had a great start on this path. I have taught Logo, Object Logo, C++, C and Java programming. I have taken and taught Cisco's four semester CCNA program. Even in my small district there are many like me whom I hesitate to call digital 'immigrants'. These people have suffered over the last ten years as resources have been devoted to getting the horses back in the barn. Their knowledge, enthusiasm, and willingness to risk have been honoured in word only. I know many 'digital immigrants' and most of them are riding a horse til the day they die; they ain't ever getting in a car. See the distinction here.

There is no real bottom line in education. Until recently those in power hired people like themselves, people who would support the team, even when the team was the Montreal Maroons or the Kansas City Monarchs. This has had devastating consequences as we find ourselves with the gap between where we are and where we need to be widening. If we could see more clearly and were not at the mercy of every fad that came down the pike, if we began where we are and simultaneously encouraged our people and began to improve our processes in authentic ways, we would do better. With so many readymade excuses for failure and so little real accountability, there is much work to do.  :)

A boss says "Go!" - a leader says "Let's go!"

Chrysler is in the process of fading away. Some of you may remember the dire straits the company faced in 1973 during and after the Arab Oil Crisis. The cars it made were not selling and the production workers were blamed.

Iacocca started as Chrysler's chairman, and began a heavy restructuring of Chrysler. At the time Iacocca took over, Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy, as it was focusing most of its money on large, fuel thirsty cars that the public didn't want due to a fuel crisis at the time.
-Wikipedia

As Lee Iacocca realized it wasn’t workers who were deciding to build the big gas guzzlers. The problem lay elsewhere.

I taught high school math through the late nineties and the early part of the 21^st century. It was a turbulent time in education in my province. The curriculum had been ratcheted up significantly in order, so the story went, to make our students competitive with any students in the world. I believe this has happened throughout North America.

Many of the grade seven and eight teachers had had a difficult time with the old curriculum. It should not have been a surprise then that without a lot of development they would have trouble with the new one. They did and are and likely will.

In the first few years of the new curriculum we would spend a lot of time discussing our grade nine students. It was not the usual harping about elementary school teachers not doing their jobs; the kind that university people direct at high school teachers as well. This was different. Students were divided into academic and applied, the latter being the less able. In some districts applied students were failing at the rate of 50%. The curriculum was a good one it seemed to us. Its implementation revealed serious weakness in our students’ preparation for it.

Many of these kids showed the effects of being taught a subject disconnected internally and externally and in a way that was not suitable for them. They had sat in a math class for 10 years before coming to us. Not understanding most of what was going on, not learning enough skills to mask a prevalent misunderstanding of the subject, their experience must have been abysmal.

One of our group said that if she were a superintendent she would not sleep until this problem had been understood and addressed. Unfortunately, instead of finding ways to enable kids to enter high school with a chance to succeed against a good curriculum, the curriculum was weakened, tests were made easier and so on.

Poor test results tell us the problem has not been solved. If the new job is to educate all students to high standards, textbooks alone have proven to be inadequate to the task. But that is not the conclusion we draw. As a result of the unholy alliance between textbook manufacturers and school districts, the books get a pass. We conclude rather that we should not only blame the high school teachers, but the elementary teachers as well. Hmmm… Is it the workers in chassis or paint?

Typically it is the teachers that take the hit. Where is the leadership that is determined to truly understand a problem in order to create the possibility of getting a solution that is a solution? Polya gave us the model 50 years ago: Understand Plan Execute Evaluate. Do your selling at the end and not at the start. It is not a good idea to begin the process with the objective of finding the best way to make a problem go away.

That is what Iacocca did at Chrysler. Eschewing expedience he is regarded as a hero in business. In the area of genuinely trying to solve the issue of student achievement in mathematics, some good work is being done by Deborah Ball at the University of Michigan and by John Mighton at the University of Toronto. What these and other heroes are doing needs to be considered.

I'm from the government and I'm here to help you!

I have learned a lot reading LeaderTalk. Thanks to Scott and to all of you. For those of us who believe that education must change radically, this is a unique opportunity. None of us knows the path, but building it will require the best of all of us. The job has changed. Where we used to have to educate thirty percent, we now have to educate them all. Upper middle class lives built on unskilled labour or agriculture are disappearing like the snow in spring. Moreover, we have to educate our students to ever higher standards. I believe that without the long lever technology represents, this cannot be done. Doing more of what we have done, but faster, and with some tinkering at the margins, will not get us where we need to be. The Madness begins in an hour; there is no time to waste.

 It is the Ides of March. Will Richardson has been asked to participate in a conference call with members of the United States Senate on the topic of reforming education. He was asked to participate by Lamar Alexander, a former Secretary of Education. It is hard to imagine a change of the magnitude that is required without a clear vision from the top. That is a point both Richardson and David Warlick have made.

  Where I live we do not have the NCLB Act. We have an indigenous form of misery called the EQAO (Educational Quality and Accountability Office). I don’t object to standardized testing per se; in fact I think it induces a touch of discipline in the educational conversation. My objection has to do with the way testing comes to dominate the discussion to the exclusion of virtually all else.

 Bob Sutton says that 90% of management advice is crap. I would guess that is true of the situation in education  as well. The advice we get muddies the water and often takes our focus off the ball. A lot of what passes for science isn’t, and the trick is to separate the useful from the useless. Standardized testing has a pernicious effect on education and this stuff often does too. I am always amazed by how vulnerable educators are to fads. We have so little confidence about our enterprise and we glom on to new ideas and approaches often on the sole basis of who dispenses them. Certain people acquire a cultlike status and their ideas are accepted uncritically. In a data driven enterprise this obeisance to authority is not helpful.

 I have been in education for 18 years, seven in elementary, seven in secondary, four in administration. My first two years were spent teaching grade one. Of all that I have done, this experience has been the most important. In that laboratory, with those children, one really gets a feel for what Piaget told us about how children learn. My deep interest in how children learn mathematics had its source here.

 Several years ago I attended a workshop given by Rudi Neufeld. Rudi has a well deserved reputation as a practical theorist in child centered hands-on learning in mathematics. He talked about Piaget and the view that for children up to about the age of 12, hands-on experience was crucial: Nothing in the mind that doesn’t get there through the fingers.

 Then he talked about a young assistant Piaget had in the early 60’s. It was the first time I had heard the name Seymour Papert. Papert extended Piaget’s view to include all learners. As Papert saw it, deep learning required hands-on experience whatever one’s age. Becoming acquainted with Papert has made all the difference in my subsequent education, especially in the area of technology, but not only there. His work on how kids ought to interact with technology remains the standard. I don't think it is a great time to be a kid in most of our schools. Opportunities to be creative and to have fun, conditions Papert beieves are essential, are scarce.

 Now I am a Principal. What I get to fill my idea-space is Fullan, Schmoker, Crevola, Marzano. A few weeks ago a group of principals presented on the topic of becoming an instructional leader. Even if you are not now one, and could never be, you must become one. One of the principals talked about her best practices, one of which was to put articles from the Arithmetic Teacher over the photocopier for her teachers to read. This generated quite a lively discussion since it turned out there were others who did this very thing. What no one apparently knew was that there was no Arithmetic Teacher and had not been for over ten years. The presumption that administrators have something to offer in terms of instructional leadership, and not just this weak’s cant, requires an argument. Ought implies can; some can’t.

 My point here is that there is good theory that helps us to understand what it is we do and how we might do it better. I am sure you have your own list. Mine would include Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, Froebel, Montessori, Piaget, Papert, and some others. The further we move from these to the gurus, the riskier our claims become.

Go Georgetown!:)