Archive for the ‘Differentiated Instruction’ Category

More reasons to differentiate the way we teach students

by Bruce Kasanoff

Once again, we are shocked (stunned, rocked, blindsided, disoriented…) by the news that our utterly outdated educational system is at best delivering average results compared to other nations. The results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported in The New York Times this week were summarized succinctly by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”

How should we educate our children?

We need to abandon the “batch” system of education that educators stole long ago from mass production assembly lines. Why do we think that the most common central element among students is the year they entered the school system? There are so many more important factors to consider, such as your learning style, the amount of effort you devote to school, your natural abilities, and the types of intelligence you evidence.

Notice I didn’t say how smart you are, or how well you take standardized tests.

Our central challenge is to bring out the best in each student. Some of us are born to be artists, others engineers. Some of us can write beautifully, but can’t sing a note. Others can bring tears (of joy) to your eyes when we sing, but can’t string two sentences together in a critical essay. Importantly, some of us are born to be engineers, and then artists.

I recently read a quote about Steve Jobs that said he has “the brain of an engineer and the heart of an artist.” Our educational system should search out and cultivate such unorthodox mixes, instead of beating everyone down into a standardized and boring compromise.

So, yes, I’d like to see schools allow a highly motivated nine-year-old to work next to students three years older, as long as she can perform at a similar level. In some subjects, that same girl might work with students younger than her.

Whenever practical, we should be blending group discussions with individualized, technology-based learning. Instead of spending five days a week in groups of 30 trying to master a new language, students ought to spend perhaps three days a week with an individualized, conversational software program and two days in a group setting. Why force kids to sit in a classroom even when they can learn faster elsewhere?

Let’s stop making all students read the same 50 “classic” books, and give them more freedom to read anything that they can demonstrate has value and relevance to their lives.

Let’s allow students to cultivate their strengths, as long as they can apply these strengths in group settings and alongside students who have other strengths.

I’d literally like to see us tear down many of the walls in our schools, creating both more flexible spaces and a more flexible approach to education. The irony is that this approach fits perfectly with our fiscally-challenged times. My guess is that ten years from now, we’ll have smaller schools doing a better job of educating more students, because we’ll be differentiating the way each student is educated, in a significant rather than superficial manner.

Fewer schools, more community centers?

by Bruce Kasanoff

In a perfect world, we would give students more freedom regarding when, where and how they best learn. This raises the twin possibilities that we would need fewer – or smaller – schools, but more community centers where students could gather and interact.

Think of a home-schooled student who spends much of her afternoon doing gymnastics and singing in a choir, and you get the basic idea. There is a real value to interacting with peers. There also are some activities – like singing in a choir – that you simply can’t do alone.

But as we create highly effective, individualized programs for teaching subjects like languages and math, many students will do better with such programs than sitting in a class of 30 being either bored or lost. They can study at home, at a library, in a community center, or even in a park. Sure, they will still need to check in periodically with a teacher, but many won’t need to spend five days a week in a classroom.

Right now, we put nearly all students into traditionally organized classrooms, and that simply doesn’t make sense either from an educational perspective or a financial one. Wouldn’t it be better to invest more money into differentiated instruction and less into rigid (literally) classrooms?

By the way, similar trends seem to be impacting libraries. Less space is needed for books, and more is needed for gathering places where people can actually talk out loud and collaborate.

Personalizing education, Swedish style

by Bruce Kasanoff

Good news: I just found a coherent and proven concept for personalized education.

Bad news: it’s in Sweden, offered by Kunskapsskolan, which means “the knowledge school.”

Good news: the KED (Kunskapsskolan Education) program is coming to the United States.

I first met Peg Hoey after she helped launch and run a charter school in the Bronx, and now she is the U.S. Project Manager for this initiative. Peg is my kind of person; she loves getting new ideas out there, and she has the initiative and expertise to turn an idea into reality.

To quote their new global site: Kunskapsskolan owns and operates 33 schools in Sweden, is the sponsor and founder of the Learning Schools Trust in the United Kingdom and provides support and curriculum to schools and educators around the world.

Peg and her colleagues hope to open a middle school in New York based on the KED program, ideally in 2011. In addition to moving through the formal application process now, they are also starting to create a US version of the learning portal their schools use in Sweden.

Peg explains, “We want to create a model school for people to see. We start with the student, not the adults, the shape of the building, or a traditional school schedule. Our core tenet is that everybody is different.”

Kunskapsskolan is a private company, but they are not looking to build and manage schools. Instead, they are seeking to work in partnership with schools, providing the tools and proven system for personalizing education.

So, for example, they might provide the KED pedagogical program for a charter school or partner with a private school or public school system who wish to deliver a more personalized approach to education.

Their approach literally starts with the student. Every student has a personal coach, a teacher who works with them throughout the school year and meets with them weekly to review their goals and the steps necessary to achieve them. These are not just loose “check in” sessions; KED includes a formal program for coaching each student.

The curriculum example from the U.K. pictured below includes both “step” and “thematic” courses, both of which allow students room for individual differences in both learning approach and pace. I urge you to take a closer look. Their website does an excellent job of explaining the KED program.

Handwriting dives, assembly line teaching thrives

by Bruce Kasanoff

Great WSJ article today on How Handwriting Trains the Brain. Too bad our school district couldn’t care less.

Last week, we asked our son’s middle school to let the school’s occupational therapist work with him on his handwriting, which is horrible. The district forced us to initiate a special needs request, which they they denied because he does well in all his classes. (It’s not a problem, they said, he can use a keyboard.)

We pointed out that it may become an issue as classes get harder and he has to take notes. Not every teacher allows keyboards/laptops, and not every subject is conducive to typed notes, such as geometry and Mandarin Chinese. We’ll deal with it if it becomes a problem, the administrators replied. Huh? He has to fail before the school will help him?

We – parents and student – are requesting help, and the school says no. The real problem is that once kids get past elementary school, they are either “normal” or “special needs.” No one is an individual. This is assembly line teaching, and it is illogical and maddening. It’s so crazy, in fact, that I’m pretty sure this nonsense will soon disappear.

So why am I writing about this? The only way nonsense like this will disappear is if we push back on labels and rigid rules. Push back.

Personalized physical ed class

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

by Fred Strong, Dean of Faculty, Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences

High school PE class. Maybe you liked it, maybe you dreaded it. Did you have “lines” and “squads”?

Even if the teaching methods in your class were more enlightened than back in my day, the drills and games probably showed who could or couldn’t do what, day after day.

And when the course was over, were you better “physically educated?” Were you better prepared to live a healthy life? Maybe, maybe not.

Now add heart rate monitors, smart phones and websites, class database software, and a creative teacher at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences. Individualized fitness routines suddenly become the heart of the curriculum. Instruction is truly diversified for each individual, and the occasional class game is a fun, social diversion. Most of all, students learn what it means to create independent workouts for themselves. They set a trajectory for their own lifelong fitness.

A 9th grade girl says that in the past, PE was always about Presidential Fitness goals and team-building skills. “You might be good at one thing and not good at something else. I was always comparing myself to everybody else, but there was no real way in the class to get better at things I wasn’t good at.”

Now everything is personalized for her. Mike Bernier, her teacher, bought a set of heart-rate monitors for his high school PE fitness curriculum in 2009. At the start of the year, he taught his students to use them, and that immediately set the mold for very dynamic and individualized instruction.

Students work out on weight-room and aerobic equipment and keep track of their heart rate. But it’s much more than just watching a number on a monitor. A 9th grade boy in the class says, “A single number isn’t that important. I look at the data of my workouts over time, look at graphs of that data, and set goals for myself.”

I asked him how he sets goals for himself, and he quickly started talking about researching different muscle groups, learning about fitness routines that supported different sports seasons, and then tracking his growth over time.

I asked him if he had always enjoyed PE classes in the past. “Yes,” he said, “but this class is different. Now we have the space to make our own goals. That’s really fun.” The investment and ownership he was expressing came through loud and clear.

Mike Bernier, the teacher and department head, describes how the pieces fit together. Students exercise with the heart-rate monitors. At the end of class, they wirelessly synch the data from their monitors to Mike’s pocket PC, and then later in the day, he downloads the data to a web-based class database (in our case, Moodle). All students in the school have accounts on Moodle, and they can access their data, work with charts and graphs, and communicate with the teacher (and each other).

Mike gives each student the option of either bringing in a workout they already have or working with him to research and design a workout. He directs them to certain websites as resources (all this information is on his course website), and he also encourages students to explore various workout apps on smartphones (if they have them). He helps them screen the apps to make sure they’re legitimate and tailored to the student’s needs.

As Mike says, “High school students are more into this than anything I’ve ever seen before. They learn about their physiology, they set target zones that are specific to them, and they set goals for themselves each day based on their circumstances.” In fact, when I observed a class recently, Mike was talking to a boy who wasn’t feeling well, so Mike was asking him how he would adjust his goals for that day. And the rest of the class wasn’t standing around waiting; they all had their workouts that they were starting in on.

I asked the girl why the Presidential Fitness program hadn’t worked for her in the way this did. “That program measured where I was, but it didn’t teach me how to improve.” I asked her how this program taught her to improve. “I used to reach my target heart-rate on the exercise bike, but now I’m at a fitness level that biking doesn’t get me there. So I switched to running, to develop other muscles and to create the workout that would get my heart rate where it needs to be. I used to be a terrible runner,” she concluded. “Now I run every day after school.”

And the 9th grade boy took his data with him to math class. He had an assignment to identify something important in his life, hypothesize about a correlation that helped to make it happen, and then collect data and graph it. He took his heart rate data and graphed it for math class. And got a good grade in both math and PE!

Mike Bernier’s class website and course syllabus can be found here. Please logon as a guest, then select “Course Categories” then “Upper School Classes” then “PE” and then “Upper School Fitness.”

21st Century Classroom framework

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

This is a framework from Backbone Communications. I post these frameworks because trying to treat different students differently is more complicated than it sounds, and it helps to have pictures of the various options and approaches.

Differentiation of Instruction: a concept map

by Bruce Kasanoff

Customizing education (and your life)

by Bruce Kasanoff

Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology

by Bruce Kasanoff

(Book review) – In the midst of chaos, it’s so valuable to discover a calm, assured voice that helps you regain control and sort out what to do next. Allan Collins and Richard Halverson provide that voice for everyone concerned about our educational system.

Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America
asks more questions than it answers, but knowing which questions to answer is essential, especially when our educational system is broken but there is no consensus how to fix it.

The authors agree with Clayton Christensen, John Seely Brown, John Hagel and others that change comes from the edges of markets. In education, that means home schooling, workplace learning, distance education, adult education, learning centers, educational television and videos, computer-based learning software, technical certifications and Internet cafes. These are the places where technology already allows customized and individualized learning.

Public schools are going to change last. By the time they do, substantial portions of our students will already be educated in a manner distinctly different from today’s system. The authors are cautious in predicting how exactly things will change, but they make it clear the change is underway.

This is a call for visionaries to step up and lead. I especially value the book because it provides a framework that will allow innovators from other industries to understand what is happening in education, and to jump in and help drive many changes.

Best of all, the book explains why we have the educational system we do today, what role it plays, and how disconnected that role seems to be from what lies ahead. It is well worth reading.

Just go to school for social reasons?

by Bruce Kasanoff

What if the main reason to go to school disappears?

Imagine a time a few years in the future, when individualized e-learning is readily available. You can study any subject, using materials and pacing that perfectly fits not only the way you learn best, but also your goals and schedule. When you need help from a teacher or advisor, you simply video chat with them, sharing a whiteboard and other materials as necessary.

This might be the perfect way to learn – at least for some – but the social aspects are missing. By social, I not only mean the personal interactions with other humans in classrooms, but also the opportunities to play sports, be in a school play, join a club, or simply have lively face-to-face discussions.

So now imagine a school designed to support these social functions. It would need far fewer classrooms, more informal meeting areas, athletic facilities, and a theater/social hall. In short, it would be smaller than schools are today, and it could accommodate more students. Translation: it would require fewer tax dollars to support.

I’m not suggesting that we should cut every school in half today. But looking out 10 or 15 years, it’s not hard for me to imagine schools that are much closer to social gathering spots than they are warehouses for kids five days a week.

If you want a parallel, look at how libraries are transforming from warehouses for books to social gathering spots for their community.

Someday, may