It is clear that technology is increasingly seen as providing opportunities for personalization, flexibility, and differentiation, and the development of 21st-century skills.

It is less clear how technology can best be utilized in schools serving students who have struggled in school, fallen off track to graduation, or dropped out altogether. On the one hand, online credit recovery has long been a staple in alternative education. And all too often, it is the equivalent of an electronic workbook in a sterile computer lab with few opportunities for the development of the higher-order, critical thinking skills necessary for postsecondary success. On the other hand, blended learning holds promise as a strategy to help students develop exactly those skills. A blended learning classroom can incorporate the best elements of face-to-face classrooms and virtual learning environments for this population—accelerating learning gains, building next-generation skills, and ensuring college readiness.

[Jobs for the Future] is currently exploring how schools can implement blended learning in a way that delivers a rigorous, college-ready academic experience with proper social supports for their students, as well as an expectation for postsecondary completion.

No longer is learning limited by locality. No longer must instruction suffer from isolation. No longer can anyone limit what can be learned, by whom, from whom and when.

I am not sure you can teach innovation, but you can unteach it

To hold teachers 100% responsible when they can account for only “10 percent of the variability in student test scores” is insane, especially in light of the fact that other factors such as “family income and education levels” account for 90% of the variability.

Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes.

On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflix streamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69.

The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first.

The andragogical model as conceived by Knowles is predicated on four basic assumptions about learners, all of which have some relationship to our notions about a learner's ability, need, and desire to take responsibility for learning:

1. Their self-concept moves from dependency to independency or self-directedness.
2. They accumulate a reservoir of experiences that can be used as a basis on which to build learning.
3. Their readiness to learn becomes increasingly associated with the developmental tasks of social roles.
4. Their time and curricular perspectives change from postponed to immediacy of application and from subject-centeredness to performance-centeredness.

A grown-up man won't sit still in a classroom while a teacher drones on about subjects that don't interest him. Andragogy recognizes that adults demand to learn things that are relevant to them, and that leverage their own life experiences rather than assuming they know nothing. Adults don't want sweeping coverage of a topic; they want to learn the parts that are interesting or relevant to them now, so they tend to prefer problem-based learning that shows the immediate applicability of what they're learning.

If adults won't stand for sitting for hours, learning about things they don't find interesting or relevant, why is it that children do? And why should they? The common response to the second question is that children don't know what they need to learn, so they need educators to decide for them. To some degree this is true; however there's overwhelming evidence that all people learn better when they're interested in the topics, and there's similar evidence that there are correlations between what we enjoy doing, what we're good at, and what we'll end up doing professionally. Typically, though, we don't teach children what fits their interests, motivations or natural talents. We simply use a one-size-fits-nobody technique that enables us to teach each student in a class of 25 almost equally poorly.

Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?  Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”

I’ve come to realize that very few people in charge of most schools and most departments of education know little about how people actually learn. We are required to post our lesson objectives on the board. Mine always reads: Students will set their own goals and work toward achieving them.

The most instructive part, however, is when my students struggle with a philosophical idea. It is a big change for a student to go from being asked “how do we solve for ‘x’?” to just plain “how do we solve?” There is nothing concrete for their minds to chew on. It requires aiming their thinking at nothing in particular. This is the single most difficult jump for students. Their minds are strung out on a diet of television, music and standardized exams. They are used to having an easy answer expressible in a simple image, whether their favorite pop star or a choice on a test.

In a span of about 10 minutes she had confronted a new and novel problem, tested different solutions, found one that worked, demonstrated it, and refined the whole process.

It got me thinking...she did this all in 10 minutes with me and a free iPad app....did she get to do anything like this level of problem solving in her 7 hours at school today?

If we focused on creating environments that kids would want to choose rather than loading our schools full of restrictive policies and if didn't over-regulate the curriculum, didn't make school so much pressure for both students and teachers, if we didn't set the path of learning down for students instead of letting them find their own way, if we didn't setup school to be a game of winners and losers competing for high marks, would we have such high figures of both homeschoolers and dropouts?

there is a place where human diversity is considered something quite negative... that's in the traditional school, in the traditional classroom. In those places we assume that all humans are essentially the same, that they develop at the exact same pace, that they have the same skills - and should have the same skills. This is not just an assumption, it is the law in the United States and many other nations. It drives almost all educational policy coming from Washington, Westminster, Canberra, Ottawa. It is even "built in" in most spaces, where matching desks line up in matching rooms and matching schedules move children through matching days.

And it is time for us, as we head toward the middle of the 21st Century, to stop all this.

Lecture, we now can see, most often leads to superficial understanding, and therefore we must have a superficial assessment instrument appropriate for superficial understanding -- the test.

1. We used to imprison the learning inside the classrooms… Now the whole school is our learning environment.

2. We used to find information in books and on the internet… Now we also interact globally via Skype with primary sources.

3. We used to control everything… Now students take ownership of their learning.

4. We used to think ‘computer’ was a lesson in the lab… Now technology is an integral part of learning across the curriculum.

5. We used to collect students’ work, to read and mark it… Now they create content for an authentic global audience.

6. We used to strive for quiet in the classroom… Now the school is filled with vibrant and noisy engagement in learning.

7. We used to teach everything we wanted students to know… Now we know learning can take place through student centred inquiry.

8. We used to set tests to check mastery of a topic… Now learning is often assessed through what students create.

9. We used to plan differentiated tasks, depending on ability… Now digital tools provide opportunities for natural differentiation.

10. We used to have an award ceremony for the graduating Year 6 students… Now every child will be acknowledged at graduation.

Schools CAN change!

The Grommets are a case of self-directed learning done collaboratively. Cognitive apprenticeship is now available for the taking because many experts are narrating their work, or are being captured by video while doing their work. This phenomenon will continue to pervade our society. We’ve all gone mobile now. We’re getting continuous feedback from our networks, as The Grommets and even the kids at HiW did. It’s not uncommon today for a 12 year old to have an international network. These can often act as learning networks. More and more people will be coming to your workplace with their own feedback systems already in place.

Technology can help these kids.  But only if the kids want to be helped.

Well, sure. That's true for any student, isn't it? But the 'black kid from West Philadelphia' rhetoric doesn't sit very well with me. Ugh.

I’m more interested in having our students leave a mark than get a mark, and so are they. So, lets be genuine with them. Push them to create  great stuff about important ideas and students will not only rise to the challenge, they will be able to articulate what they have learned and why it matters.  Do this and don’t cheapen it with a mark, share your descriptive feedback offer  a genuine response. Let them know that when it comes time to write the report card you’ll turn the great things they have created into a grade and all they have to do is keep creating things~the wonderful thing about people is we actually do great things when we are given the chance, a purpose feedback and an audience

The top 20 percent in IQ on the one hand, and in creativity on the other, were singled out and asked to rank certain personality traits (a) on the degree to which they would like to have these traits, and (b) on the degree to which they believed teachers would like the student to have. … While the high IQs “preferred traits” correspond closely to their perception of the teachers’ values, the high creatives’ ranking of preferred traits was actually inversely related to the perceived teachers’ ranking. The high creatives do not fail to conform; rather they do not wish to conform.

If you are looking to increase a child's anxiety, desire to escape and fear of failure, or decrease their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy then it makes perfect sense to grade students.

However, if you are interested in helping children learn, you might want to consider leaving the grade out and only providing them with the formative comments they need to improve.

From John Dewey to Jean Piaget, educators have generally agreed that while didactic teaching has its place, small children learn mainly from interacting and not passive listening, understanding and not memorizing, reading for fun and not simply decoding. "The good news," says Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, "is that children can be taught basic academic skills - fundamentals of reading, writing and mathematics - in a way that uses, rather than destroys, their natural desire to learn. Vocabulary can be taught by conversation, awareness of print developed through reading and talking about books and mathematics learned with games like a pretend restaurant."

Drill-and-skill is not how middle-class children got their edge, Dean Stipek says, so "why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"

Research has shown that the key factor in student success is being engaged. Students who are not engaged are less likely to perform well in school, more likely to fail classes, and less likely to graduate. In the 2006 Civic Enterprises report, The Silent Epidemic, high school dropouts reported that the most frequent reason for leaving school was that classes were not interesting.

we’re entering a digital age where students access the information they want—how they want it, when they want it and where they want it (think personalized learning at any time, place or pace). This will have a profound effect on critical thinking as people are increasingly fed only the exact type of information (specific political views, topical book themes and local environmental conditions) and sources (individual blogs, new media and ethnically oriented online spaces) to which they digitally subscribe. In many ways, hyperpersonalized (customized) digital spaces have the potential to limit students to only the content that they want to see, hear and read about. While considering personalization and technology, we need to think about the role of critical thinking, diversity and chance (serendipity), and their importance to learning and society, and to the long-term implications of driving digital personalization (customization) in terms of the future of public education.

Those of us participating in narratives of privilege inscribe those stories on our hearts and forever look inward away from the world. Those of us participating in narratives of struggle inscribe those stories on our hearts and forever look for ways out.

There is a difference between compliance and engagement – as well as between a student’s willingness to follow a liked teacher and a student’s own path.

If  education was really about learning…

…we’d let kids ask more questions and then give them support to find their own answers.

…we’d see dunking milk in cookies as a science opportunity, not just a snack.

…we’d only give kids giant test booklets if they needed to use the paper build a tower to explore force & motion.

…we’d label our kids with terms like “mostly visual learner, hilarious, excels in reading, struggles with addition, loves baseball” instead of “Proficient” or “Basic”

…we’d stop making copies of low-level worksheets and give more blank sheets of paper for brainstorming.

…we’d make it our goal to get kids to ask questions in class that we cannot answer, nor Google the answer to.

…we’d stop spending billions on textbooks.

…we’d celebrate mistakes far more than we celebrate earning “A’s”.

…success would be overcoming obstacles and embracing struggle, not “perfect papers”.

…we’d invite an engineer or scientist to class to answer questions and not just because it’s a grade level standard.

…we’d talk more about finding their passion than about Friday’s Spelling Test.

…we’d take the best theories of gifted education, special education, and everything in between, and make a school where ALL kids needs are met.

…our kids would never question “Why do I have to learn this?” because they’d be too busy investigating.

…inquiry would rule over lecture.

…professional development would be differentiated, meaningful, and steer clear of reading PowerPoint slides.

…every school would be filled with the type of collaboration happening on Twitter every single day.

…we wouldn’t hear things like “We don’t teach that since it’s not tested.”

Education might not be about learning right now.  But, that doesn’t mean your classroom can’t be about learning.

I don't usually quote posts in their entirety. That's how awesome this one is...

It can't be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one-when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own.

Hat tip: Zac Chase, http://twitter.com/#!/MrChase/status/134415331358806017

New teachers struggle with classroom management because, given the choice, most students would not sit through their lessons. This should tell us we need to throw our interest behind improving the lessons, not finding new carrots and sticks for getting kids to listen while we teach.

Hat tip: Will Richardson, http://willrichardson.com