Archive for the ‘Differentiated Instruction’ Category

The next big thing: personalized education

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

About a year ago, Howard Gardner wrote an article in Foreign Policy about personalized education. Here are a few excerpts:

Throughout most of history, only the wealthy have been able to afford an education geared to the individual learner. For the rest of us, education has remained a mass affair, with standard curricula, pedagogy, and assessments.

…But now for the first time it is possible to individualize education — to teach each person what he or she needs and wants to know in ways that are most comfortable and most efficient, producing a qualitative spurt in educational effectiveness.

…In fact, we already have the technology to do so. Well-programmed computers — whether in the form of personal computers or hand-held devices — are becoming the vehicles of choice.

…I’d bet on Singapore or Sweden before wagering on U.S. public schools. I recall the words of Winston Churchill: “The American people always do the right thing, after they’ve tried every other alternative.”

Danger! Is your school an “Assembly Line” school?

by Bruce Kasanoff

This morning I played tennis with a friend of mine in his seventies, and we observed that the way many classrooms function hasn’t changed much since he was a student.

In the meantime, the way we generate, sort, analyze, distribute and share information has changed dramatically. Likewise, the tools we possess to communicate with each other, to learn and to share have gone through multiple iterations.

Assembly Line schools have basically ignored these developments. They are still organized in a one-size-fits-all system designed to prevent students and parents from questioning educators or administrators. “We teach in the classic, time-tested manner,” they might say.

Unfortunately, old doesn’t mean time-tested. In this case, it simply means outdated.

Here’s how to tell if your school is an Assembly Line school:

Every student gets taught the same way
If you’re in a class with 29 other students, you are all going to be doing the same thing, day in and day out. It doesn’t matter how you learn, or how fast, you are all going to try to march in lockstep for the whole year.

Every student gets the same assignments
Except on rare occasions, your assignments will not differ from your classmates. The class was designed long before you came on the scene, and will be taught long after you depart. The teacher is not going to do anything different to help you learn.

Students sit in a classroom five days a week, listening to the teacher
Stare longingly out the window if you must, but you are not getting out of this classroom. Assembly Line schools operate under the false belief that being present in a classroom equates to learning. Nevermind that you might be able to master the material twice as fast if you got to work at your own pace, or perhaps with an online system, or perhaps with a few peers who learn similarly to you. Sit!

Teachers do not have personal relationships with each student
At Assembly Line schools, building personal relationships with students just isn’t part of the culture. The system isn’t set up to facilitate this; there is close to zero motivation or support for teachers to do this. Excuses abound. An “us vs. them” mentality springs up. The energy gets sucked out of everyone.

Neither the teacher nor the school knows what kind of learner each student is
Why does it matter? Regardless of the answer, the school and the teacher is not going to treat that student differently.

Aside from online homework assignments, most courses make no greater use of technology than they did five years ago
These schools are surrounded by technology. Students communicate via technology that barely existed five years ago. News spreads throughout your community and your school like lightning. But most classrooms remain firmly rooted in a system designed to produce Model T automobiles, instead of educated human beings.

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to speak out. Students are not going to get a good education at an Assembly Line school. Please don’t give up. This blog is designed to help you change your school, whether you are a student, parent, teacher… or anyone else who thinks and cares.

Unleash learning! Make it individualized.

by Bruce Kasanoff

“People are hungry to learn new things. But traditional learning confines us to stiff, stagnant curricula that are outdated and boring. If we temper rigid structure with some freedom, while still providing challenge and guidance, learners’ motivation soars. I believe that people become more engaged when they have the ability to shape the experience themselves a bit. Learning will become more individualized and yet, more interactive at the same time.” So said Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton. Check out her blog.

Customized paths to learning

by Bruce Kasanoff

I adapted this framework from the book Disrupting Class and from Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory. My goal is not to propose the ‘right’ way, but rather to demonstrate that even with a few variables you end up with many different customized lesson plans (in this case, 8 x 3 x 3 = 72).

Sitting quietly in a room with a bunch of people?

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

How long are you willing to sit in a room with 25 or 30 people? Imagine that a non-profit you support has a meeting, and it stretches 5 1/2 hours. Is that too long?

It’s common sense that 30 people sitting together won’t accomplish much. If you really want to get something done, sooner or later you have to break into smaller groups, or let people work on their own. Otherwise, you waste enormous amounts of time and don’t get much accomplished.

Unfortunately, this is the way most classrooms operate. Students sit in groups of about 30 while a single teacher attempts to impart knowledge. It’s inefficient, illogical, and outdated.

Let’s do the math. To use rounds numbers, let’s assume a class of 30 students meets five days a week for 60 minutes each. That’s 300 minutes. Imagine that right now, all of that time is spent in a group.

Students get zero personal attention from the teacher.

Now imagine that the teacher allows each student to spend half the “class” time working on individually tailored assignments; during this time, the student does not have to be in the classroom. That means the average number of students in the class at any given moment is now 15.

Suddenly, the teacher is working at the equivalent of an elite private school. He or she can much more easily observe how each student participates in the class discussions, and how prepared they are. It’s a different world.

The technology exists to do this. The main reason it’s not happening is inertia, and a bunch of rules that have little to do with the welfare of students.

Getting personal with technology

by Bruce Kasanoff

How a South Carolina elementary school has used computers to engage students in a learning process calibrated to their individual needs and abilities. Read story or go directly to resources/downloads from Forest Lake Elementary School.

No more cookie-cutter teaching!

by Bruce Kasanoff

Nothing frustrates me more than lazy, old-fashioned cookie-cutter teaching.

I’m talking about teachers who stand up and lecture, who have one strategy and one strategy only for getting students to learn, and who care more about doing things their way than helping kids learn.

I’m also talking about administrators and school boards that tolerate – or even foster – this sort of utterly outdated, largely ineffective teaching.

There’s simply no excuse for it. Let’s knock down the excuses one by one:

Budget cuts: Money is tight, no doubt. So get kids out of the classroom! Very few subjects require students to sit day after day as one unit doing the same thing. Most classes would benefit from letting students work on individualized assignments 1/3 to 1/2 of the time, wherever they choose: at home, in the library, on the lawn. When individualized learning takes hold, we’ll probably be able to reduce our need for classroom space significantly.

Tradition: “This is the way we teach this course.” The way we teach english, math, science and foreign languages date back to the days when the Internet didn’t exist and every responsible home had an encyclopedia in it. Today, the idea of fitting all our knowledge into one set of books is laughable. Students need to learn how to search, analyze and validate information; not to memorize it by rote. Any course that hasn’t been redesigned in the past five years is sadly lacking.

Proven method: Unless your approach is individualized, it hasn’t been proven by the criteria that matters most: does it help all kids learn? Schools label kids as lazy, not that smart, unmotivated, disaffected, etc. Most of these labels have more to do with the school not having the motivation to help every student than anything else. People learn differently; that’s a fact. This means teachers and schools have to be able to accommodate many different learning styles, something that was impossible until technology made it not only possible but also essential.

I don’t have the power to change this: At The Wharton School, I had a professor who demonstrated that no matter who you are: teacher, manager, top executive or politician – you can feel powerless. The truth is, we all have the ability to create change. Your power derives from a single source: your conviction that change is essential, and you are going to make it happen.

Keap your brain sharp (I mean keep)

by Bruce Kasanoff

“The baby boom, ” says Derrick Chasan of CogniFit, “Is the first generation that both has access to cognitive fitness programs and is aware of the fact that exercising your cognitive abilities helps you keep them sharp.” In other words, use it or lose it.

The problem is that you get very good at what you do, and thus your brain doesn’t have to work very hard to go through your daily routine. (If you still can), think about what you do each day. Most of us have a great deal of routine in our lives. Even on tough days, we seldom challenge our brains to learn new tasks. You may be a knee surgeon, but after performing the same operation 5,214 times, you are not challenging your brain.

What’s a new task? Try learning the cello at age 52, or learning Japanese at 61. Either will keep your brain sharp, but since few of us take on such challenges, Chasen says there’s a need for online cognitive fitness programs like CogniFit.

This slick product – I mean that in a good way – performs an initial assessment of your cognitive abilities and then creates a customized set of training exercises designed to turn your weaknesses into strengths. It requires a fairly significant investment of time, but Chasen says their approach is the most scientifically rigorous of the many brain training offerings out there. Although the site just launched a little less than two months ago, a predecessor CD-based product has been around for ten years and this version is based on training results of over 112,000 users.

Even if you don’t immediately decide to start working with their Personal Coach training program, it’s worth a visit to their site to learn about what aging does your yur brain.