Performance Task Assessment, sometimes referred to simply as Performance Assessment, is coming soon in a substantial and significant way to K-12 schooling; 21st century principals and other educational leaders would do well to familiarize themselves with this method and began to make plans for successful integration of this new, alternative format of assessments.
[the following 10 or so paragraphs lay out some background for my “10 Things;” scroll down to the section heading if you want to skip over the background discussion]
President Obama and Secretary Duncan have been assuring us for several years that they will take standardized testing “beyond the bubble,” and both PARCC and Smarter Balanced are working hard at developing new common core assessment using the format of perfomance task assessment.
PARCC is… contracting with [other organizations] to develop models of innovative, online-delivered items and rich performance tasks proposed for use in the PARCC assessments. These prototypes will include both assessment and classroom-based tasks.
Smarter Balanced, meanwhile, states that by 2014-15,
Smarter Balanced assessments will go beyond multiple-choice questions to include performance tasks that allow students to demonstrate critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.
Performance tasks challenge students to apply their knowledge and skills to respond to complex real-world problems. They can best be described as collections of questions and activities that are coherently connected to a single theme or scenario.
These activities are meant to measure capacities such as depth of understanding, writing and research skills, and complex analysis, which cannot be adequately assessed with traditional assessment questions.
Samples of the performance tasks being developed for grades K-8 are available here. (more…)
Like most of my friends and colleagues in the 21st century learning arena, I hold high regard for Yong Zhao. It is an enormous asset for our movement to have his global perspective and all that he brings from his expertise in Chinese education as a comparison and a warning for developments in US education, and beyond his tremendous knowledge base, it is just wonderful how enthusiatic and passionate he is about unleashing students and celebrating their diverse and creative spirits.
I’ve written about Zhao here before, praising his previous book Catching Up or Leading the Way, and I was grateful to have him join my pages on one occasion, as he added commentary to a sharp debate I was having in several posts and comment sections with Bob Compton regarding his film, Two Million Minutes, the 21st century solution. (Scroll down to comment number 9.)
This new book carries forward many of the themes of the previous, and indeed, in one section, about the curious pattern of US and Chinese education each seeking to emulate the other, it feels particularly repetitive. That said, it is an incredibly important discussion about which Zhao has deep insight, and he has brought it up to date with many new supporting details.
One of those new details regards the bizarre laws the Chinese national government is putting into place sharply limiting, to the point of fines, the number of days and hours students can be in school, in an effort to circumscribe the obsessed workaholic-ism that overcomes so many Chinese students and ultimately, the argument goes, curtails their creativity, happiness, and self-confidence. In an effort to evade these strict prohibitions, one school, the story is told, bussed its students to a different city to live in dorms and undertake an extra two weeks of study.
What stands out in the new book are three important messages. First, the Common Core is deeply flawed and detrimental to what ought to be our society’s primary objective for education, to develop creative, innovative, entrepreneurial citizens. Second, entrepreneurship is, in of itself, the single best descriptor for that objective, and Zhao takes care to define it and imbue it with his enthusiasm.
Third, and most fully, we can describe the ideal educations for developing this most important objective, and it is a combination of the What: student autonomy and voice; the How, Product-Oriented Learning; and the Where: Globally, in every way we can.
Throughout my reading of World Class Learners, I find myself more conflicted than I expected. From Zhao’s perspective, and it is a sound one, the US is deeply at risk of having already gone too far, and now accelerating toward, making the deep, fundamental mistake of Chinese education, centralizing it around a narrow set of high, content-oriented, academic standards which are tested in extremely high stakes assessments. Because of that, he seeks to push back, push back hard against the entire agenda, and he is right to do so.
But at times, this reader fears he takes a bit of a step too far. We want to free our students from such centralized high pressure testing and we do want to celebrate, honor and affirm our students extraordinary diversity of talents and ambitions, but we also want them to learn deeply, richly, masterfully, an array of essential skills and we believe they will do best in content rich subjects. I am not suggesting Zhao, whom I’d like to count as a friend, speaks against academic excellence, but whether by design or inadvertently, his book allows too frequently the inference that he is not as concerned as I am about strong academic accomplishment. (more…)
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Week four of a new weekly post, Quotes of the Week. (For more about QoTW, click here.)
As I noted in the first post, I highly recommend principals, school-heads, and other educational leaders provide their own version of suggested readings/links in a weekly email newsletter. Curate them: don’t give them too much, but choose the best three, four, or five (max).
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The Mission:
To create and bring mindful change and innovation to Poughkeepsie Day School in order to improve learning and teaching.
As I see it, the idea is for these teams to delve into aspects of the topic while remaining connected with the other teams so that connections and cross fertilization become even more of the norm than they already are.
The basic idea is for affinity groups – not groupthink tanks – but interconnected, cross-divisional teams interested in some of the same big ideas. And for those teams to make change within the school by identifying what matters, what we can do about it and then getting started.
It’s an opportunity to work with others to shape something that has clarity, direction and results. And the accountability is built into the mission.
People who do not use Twitter and Social Media often state that “real relationships” cannot be formed through these avenues. This summer was a clear example of how friendships CAN result from relationships formed through social media.
4) Exhibit Enthusiasm and Encouragement – A spirited mentor exudes a passion for education and a commitment to honing one’s craft. Mentors are often pioneers as they test out new methods and materials and are willing to take risks. They revel in the joy of discovery and this spirit is infectious.
I’m recently returned from a quick trip to beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia. Thursday I presented a five hour workshop on 21st century learning for the faculty of Tandem Friends School, and was pleased that nearly a third of the faculty volunteered to stay on for an additional 75 minutes for the material I hadn’t completed in the regular time.
In my visit, we toured two of her district’s schools, and met many of her hard-working teachers. Several themes emerged.
1. Open-ness and transparency.
“I think we have one of the most unfiltered internet service of any school district in the nation,” Pam told me, and this seemed to exemplify a larger spirit to open the world into her schools and to bring her students out to the wider world, in every way possible. When visiting a middle school, she explained to me that this was the most rural school in her district, and that that was why it was chosen as a pioneer school for a 1-1 laptop program: because these were the students who have otherwise the least access to the wider world of information. This district is also proudly BYOD across all its high schools– students are all, always, welcome and encouraged to bring and use their own mobile devices and the educators there are striving to help students use them productively and wisely.
Pam herself is wide open, personally. As we toured she never hesitated to go up to anyone in her path and introduce herself–sticking out her left arm for a shake and then reaching over with her right to be even warmer in a semi-embrace– and then to ask them about their roles, their work, and to enthuse about it. We went right into classrooms and engaged students and teachers, gushing over what was happening. Pam was simultaneously on her iphone, texting and tweeting as we went, determined to broadcast more widely the exciting things which were happening and to stay in touch with her network, both internal to her district and out in the wider world.
Learning spaces we observed, such as the libraries at both the middle and high school and in new cluster classroom areas of the big high school, similarly displayed this philosophy of transparency. Regularly could be seen windows replacing walls, making spaces where everything happening became more visible to all school community members. Lockers were being removed from the high school, Pam explained, (“most students don’t use them”) so as to create more open, central, common spaces, which soon will be furnished with comfortable furnishings and tables to create stronger spaces of civil society for the students.
I find this fascinating metaphorically, the replacement of private lockers, which take up valuable real estate so that students can store their individual stuff, by communal open spaces. As more and more, student textbooks and notebooks are replaced by mobile technologies, which are nearly always carried on our persons, surely lockers will be ever less important for school-goers, and it is great to see the opportunities this change provides for more open space, more connection and community.
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Week three of a new weekly post, Quotes of the Week. (For more about QoTW, click here.) Click them, share them, spread the wealth!
As I noted in the first post, I highly recommend principals, school-heads, and other educational leaders provide their own version of suggested readings/links in a weekly email newsletter. Curate them; that is to say, don’t give them too much, but choose the best three, four, or five (max).
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But teaching is so much more than quizzes, lectures and data collection. And the promise of technology isn’t that can automate the rote tasks of teaching – in the end that’s low hanging fruit. The promise of technology is rather the way that it can allow teachers and students to work together to do more, create more, research more broadly, share more widely, learn more deeply.
If, after surfing and consuming and participating and producing and cutting and pasting and photographing and editing and uploading and downloading and boondoggling, you continuallyreturn to a certain activity, a certain blog, a certain focus, a certain app . . . that thing, that action, defines you. It’s what you’re about. It’s a statement of priority, which, in the attentional quicksand stirred up by new media and technology, is kind of a big deal. You are what you return to . . . I am what I return to . . .We are what we return to . . .
Personally, I find blogging to be like a release valve of my creative thinking. If only you could see my piles of journals filled over many years. I have always wanted to write, I have written, but nobody else had read my thoughts until I discovered blogging. (more…)
The new school year is launching, and it is a busy time for establishing our academic routines, but don’t let this year be another year of business as usual. Take the opportunity our annually cyclical enterprise provides us to reconsider which of our routines are ready to be reversed.
It is remarkable how quickly the concept of flipping the classroom surged, spread, and has taken root across a great breadth of schools. Though it is by no means universal, or universally favored, what a buzz flipping has created. Some may dismiss the buzz around flip teaching as faddish and short-lived, but I think the buzz is happening because flipping is un-dismissible.
The speed with which it has spread, however, is not entirely surprising when we factor the significance of networked learning and social media today. As Chris Anderson, who is the “curator” of the Ted Talks and a remarkable thinker in his own right, explains in what is one of my very favorite TED Talks, Crowd Accelerated Innovation: “New global communities [are] granting their members both the means and the motivation to step up their skills and broaden their imaginations. It is unleashing [and accelerating] an unprecedented wave of innovation in thousands of different disciplines.”
This post isn’t about flipping the classroom; it is about extending the spirit of the flip throughout the work of our schools. (For more about flipping instruction, seeFlip Your Classroom, the fine new ASCD book from a pair of high school chemistry teachers who pioneered the practice at their rural Colorado high school, or my recent review of the book. )
Dan Pink was the among the first to write on a large platform about flipping instruction (Daily Telegraph, September 2010), and last year he extended the spirit of flipping in a book available free online, the Flip Manifesto, which is entirely worth your perusal. As he describes it, “The manifesto you have here offers 16 pieces of advice that run counter to-indeed, that often directly contradict-what you might have heard elsewhere.”
Borrowing from Pink’s example and drawing from the spirit of the recent Olympics and the vitality, charm, and smiling magnanimity of the magnificent Gabby Douglas cartwheeling across the floor exercise, let’s flip our way across and throughout our school cultures.
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Flip Meetings. This is the first and most obvious extension of flipping the classroom; apply the same principle to faculty, board, and other types of meetings. Instead of taking the precious time of people coming together for the presentations which precede conversations, shift the presentations to video delivered in advance. Bill Ferriter has written very helpfully about flipping faculty meetings; Lee Burns at Presbyterian Day School (TN) is flipping his board meetings and reports positively about his success.
Flip Mission. We are conditioned after decades of repetition to perceive mission as the ultimate core of our organization, and only occasionally do we see purpose paired with mission, either as a separate statement following mission, or as commitment made within the mission, usually toward the end. Invert it. What is most important about our organization isn’t what we do but why we do it and the difference we are seeking to make in the world.
Purpose, Dan Pink has explained so thoroughly in Drive, is what drives people; it is among the primary motivations we know of, along with autonomy and mastery (and let’s face it, so much more significant than autonomy and mastery). Put purpose first, and shift mission in the subordinate role. (more…)
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With great pleasure I offer the following thoughts as my contribution to Scott McLeod’s annual Leadership Day blog challenge. This is my third contribution; my previous posts are here and here.
What do I most want to prepare students for?
Robust, responsible, citizenship, defined broadly as full-blooded participation and contribution to the commonweal.
Life-long learning, the attitude and the aptitude to never stop developing themselves into who they wish to become.
Yet neither are possible, I believe, or at minimum both are greatly diminished, in the 21st century without a strong set of technological skills and savvy.
Accordingly, our schools need to become places where the development of such skills and savvy is a significant and express priority and commitment.
Accordingly, educators need to be role models of both robust, responsible citizenship and life-long learning, digitally skilled and savvy and willing and able to teach the same.
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I want to challenge conventional wisdom here, my own and that of others, and suggest a reframing of the role of technology in our learning goals for students, taking the digital dimension from subordinate to superior.
This conventional wisdom takes that position that technology integration comes second, subordinate to our students’ learning goals (or our goals for them) and subordinate to our best pedagogical practices. Tech is a (only) tool which serves those priorities.
We bristle when we are accused of advocating technology for technology’s sake–the horror! Of course we are not, we indignantly respond.
A related piece of the conventional wisdom is the idea that schools can develop 21st century skills and prepare for 21st century success without using technology. In the recent book A Leader’s Guide to 21st century education, Ken Kay and Val Greenhill argue that “4Cs instructional strategies do not require technology.”
There is value in both these positions, and I’ve expressed both in the past, but I’ve come to decide they are both half-wrong.
Mindset matters: if we adopt these general principles too strongly into our educational leadership world view, much of the decision-making we have to do will be strongly influenced, both consciously and unconsciously, by them. It is important than to focus on these general conceptual understandings, surface them and engage them in order to shift our leadership as necessary. (more…)
As a school leader, an educator, and a parent, I think one of the most crucial things I can do is try to help people confront fear and move through it. True growth requires genuine and honest introspection, and that demands courage. The criticism—bad and good—must, to a degree, turn inward.
One reason I like writing this blog is because I feel a twinge of fear about each post. But I have to put myself out there.
The idea of looking through a “book”, or even website, at some of the best pictures onephotographer has done limits the customer to only the mind and work of that photographer. These communities can inspire everyone with new ideas that they can all use or build upon.
It is easy to say that we want our schools to adopt a 21st century learning program; it is only a little bit harder to describe what that program looks like. The real work, we all know, is in the execution. Ken Kay and Val Greenhill, the team who led (Ken was Founding President) the Partnership for 21st century skills (P21) recognized this a couple years ago, and shifted the focus of their important work from calling for this transformation and from describing a program to, instead, supporting the leaders who are executing it in their districts and schools, in a new organization called EdLeader21.
In doing so, they are working with, supporting and learning from, an assemblage of some of the very most interesting and exciting school superintendents in the country, including Pam Moran, Jared Cotton, Jim Merrill, and, right here in Tucson, Mary Kamerzall. With the benefit of this experience, they have now written a very valuable, very informative book, about which the only significant criticism is that it leaves the reader with an angst for more– more such information, more detail, specifics and examples: when is the sequel coming? I’ll throw in a few notes here about the areas I most hope to hear more about.
Full disclosure time: I enjoyed greatly my one year experience with edleader21, and have been an advocate for that organization. I know Ken and Val personally, and am delighted to be neighbors of a sort with them here in Tucson (in fact, I am writing this in a central Tucson Starbucks, and I keep looking over my shoulder in case one or the other of them walks up behind me). The complimentary copy of the book I am reviewing was sent to me as a kind courtesy on their part, with a warm and generous inscription.
Ken and Val’s first step is, of course, the essential and universal first step: “Adopt your vision” (just as my version of the seven steps commences with “Develop your vision (and Keep developing it.”) The discussion here is rich and invigorating; it will energize readers.
There is no single version for 21st century student success that is the same in every school or district. Lasting success always comes down to leaders like you. For the vision to make an actual difference in students’ lives, it must come from and be embraced by the leaders of the school and district. A vision that is born of genuine, authentic, passionate leadership is never simple, never cookie-cutter, and never easy. But it is necessary.
Especially resonant for me is this quote from Virginia Beach Superintendent Jim Merrill:
I have finally found the thing in education that truly motivates me and it’s this 21st century education initiative. This is why I am supposed to be a leader in this field.
The overview of the 8 key “perspectives” which are bringing so many to this appreciation for the importance of a shift in teaching and learning is excellent; I learned a great deal. There is a powerful graph showing the change in workforce categories coming into our century, and good stats from a 2010 report that more than half of companies surveyed do measure the 4Cs in their performance review.
John Bransford, the renowned learning expert: is helpfully quoted:
in the US today we tell our kids the same thing 100 times and on the 101st time, we ask them if they can remember what we told them the first hundred times when in the 21st century the coin of the realm is if they can look at material they have never seen before and know what to do with it.
This first step/chapter, by itself, would be highly worthwhile reading for boards, education students, and others. (more…)
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This post could be almost infinite: there is most certainly an extraordinary array of options for videos which expand educators’ understandings and inspire advances in 21st century learning. But curation is about choice and selection, and while I know I will leave out many, I thought I’d offer up a set of 15 of my favorites for your consideration for video screening at at back-to-school or beginning-of-the-year faculty meetings (and/or parent and board meetings).
I’ve starred those that might also serve as useful and engaging videos to share with students at back to school or other assemblies.
I am sure every reader will have their own opinions about the videos I’ve left off this list, and please: add them below using the comment box, or, post yourself your own set and share the link from this post to your own.
21st century learning generally:
1. Will Richardson’s TEDx talk is a terrific way to open the perspective: we are talking about our kids, and their future, and what really matters for them, and what are we doing now to help them.
As spinning class began yesterday I was chatting with a friend; we both have kids at the same school (St. Gregory), and we were chatting about it being the first day of school. I mentioned to him that my son, now a 9th grader, was bicycle commuting to school– and that I love the delight he takes in managing his own commute: “It suffuses him with a sense of self-reliance, of self-actualization. It is great.” My friend responded that he wished his own kids could get themselves to school, and expressed appreciation for the value of that spirit; he said “if could bottle that kind of self-reliance, I’d give it to my kids daily.”
Seeing him ride was also stimulated my own nostalgia– I biked to school daily in elementary school, and then again in high school, and then again for nearly a decade of teaching high school in Berkeley, California. My strongest memory is the shift I experienced, not riding (because of a 15 mile commute) in middle school, and then resuming the practice in 10th grade.
I remember vividly arriving at school each morning in such a different frame of mind from having gotten myself there: I was an actor in my own life, an agent of my own accomplishment, and I carried that through each school day. I remember the very snowy days when my bike and the bike of my favorite Spanish teacher were the only two on the bike rack; I remember the days when the girl upon whom I had a crush would ride by in her mom’s car, and I would frantically try to keep up with her car and show her my strength.
We know that student mindset is essential to their success. In Teaching and Assessing 21st century skills, Marzano and Heflebower argue that among the critical 21st century skills is “self-efficacy,” about which they write:
Probably the centerpiece of understanding and controlling oneself is developing self-efficacy. At its core, self-efficacy is the disposition that an individual has control over his or her life. Self-efficacy plays a major role in performance.… “the average weighted correlation between self-efficacy and work-related performance was (G) r= .38, which transforms into an impressive 28% gain in task performance.”
Riding and walking to and from school develop and advance, I believe deeply, exactly the kind of self-efficacy which we most want for our students: “control over his or her life.”
Similarly, in the new book from my friends Ken Kay and Val Greenhill, The Leader’s Guide to 21st century education, they discuss the key skills to be considered as critical and essential in addition to the 4 C’s” (Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity), and they put “Self-Direction” at the top of the list.
Some would argue we are facing a national crisis in self-direction. They might be right….. Everywhere we go we hear that many of today’s young people lack self-direction… they either want to be told what to do next or they simply can’t or won’t try to figure things out on their own. In the 21st century, that’s a huge liability… (more…)
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The power of the network is a something of a new intellectual paradigm I observe– in the world today and in own my life. It is so fascinating to recognize the many ways in which today, learning is happening not by the handing down from above of received wisdom by experts but by active co-creation among a networked cluster, sometimes large and sometimes small, of people, young and old, with common interest, learning from each other and with each other.
Metaphors matter, and the metaphor for knowledge and its organization which mostly we have inherited is that of the tree– but today, the tree has been felled. This ten minute video lays it out visually and graphically: our world-view about the construction and transmission of knowledge has changed or should be changing.
To quote Manual Lim, the speaker for this video,
there is an need for a new way of thinking, and this new way of thinking is a holistic way of thinking, that everything is connected, everything is interdependent.
Lim concludes with the point this this a beautiful thing, this new networked understanding of the world, with enormous benefits and enormous opportunities.
How are we helping ourselves, how are we helping our educational colleagues, how are we helping our students connect to the power of networks?
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The NMC, New Media Consortium, Horizon Project Short list, K-12, was published earlier this year, and is a handy, thought-provoking guide to where we are headed. I can’t say I know a lot about NMC, but I think I ought to know more about them– and they at least at a surface level seem a very impressive, open source, resource for the future direction of educational technology. As a 501 (c)3, they appear to relatively freer of corporate control or influence than some of the other actors in this arena.
From Wikipedia:
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of more than 250 colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies….The consortium serves as a catalyst for the development of new applications of technology to support learning and creative expression, and sponsors programs and activities designed to stimulate innovation, encourage collaboration, and recognize excellence among its member institutions.
My post here is in response to the Short List document.
There are three sections in the Short List, based on time horizons: One Year, Two to Three Years, and Four to Five Years. Each has four predicted developments, and each development is summarized, with note on its relevance, examples of it in practice, and suggested further readings.
In the One year section, we find Cloud Commuting, Collaborative Environments, Mobiles and Apps, and Tablet Computers.
1. It is great to see the emphasis on collaborative online environments, where so much contemporary work is now taking place and where our students need more practice. The tools to support them are free and easily available, and as a huge fan of “The New World of Learning,” I appreciate the “relevance” outlined here: Large scale collaborative environments can facilitate an almost spontaneous development of communities of people who share similar interests.
Examples of collaboration in practice include the fascinating Badgestack Project, the widely recognized Flat Classroom project, and something new to me, an eLanguages project for language teacher and classroom collaboration, which strikes me as a terrific resource.
Most intangible assets are real but invisible, and the most important invisible ability is the ability (or, perhaps better said, the probability) to collaborate. After all, it’s the willingness on the part of people to work together to solve problems when they could just as easily pass them along to someone else that forms the core of most things we call collaboration.
It’s the decision that someone makes to share an idea or to spend the extra hour helping out — not the regulation or contract that requires it — that usually means the difference between “good enough” and “outstanding.”
2. The Mobiles and Apps section in the Short List report reads to me as a bit muddled– it is in part an endorsement of smart phones, IPads and apps, and in part a discussion of the rising BYOD trend. I am a fan of both, but I don’t intermingle them in my thinking as this short piece does. Using iPads and associated apps doesn’t seem to me to be at the heart of BYOD programs; they seem very different to me, in that many students will bring their own Device which isn’t an iPad. In any case, they are right to see both as looming right now as fast-emerging trends.
The examples don’t grab me; the suggested readings are useful, including the excellent Lisa Nielsen piece on BYOD myths debunked.
Confusingly, the following section on Tabletsrepeats focus on iPads, and argues that as a one-to-one solution they are engaging, adaptable, economical, and flexible. I’d agree with most of these assertions, but not all. I was intrigued by the video referenced in the section:
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The Two to Three Year section features Digital Identity, Game-based Learning, Learning Analytics, and Personal Learning Environments. (more…)
21k12 