Opening Fairfax County Secondary Schools this Fall

Dear FCPS School Board and Leadership,

This Spring had its challenges. I'm not going to re-hash them, but want to praise the many teachers and administrators who still made effective learning happen for their students. I was impressed by and grateful for my daughter's devoted, talented, creative teachers.

Here are some thoughts about secondary schools as you plan to open FCPS this Fall:

1: Your Proven Online Solution: Use Fairfax's Online Campus to push many courses online that already have virtual versions. Perhaps the base experience for many classes could be shifted to the Online Campus course, with in-person instruction once/week (as long as health conditions allow) as well as weekly synchronous virtual class sessions (see below). FCPS has the content and infrastructure to make this work. Also note that leaning heavily on Online Campus will make it easier to pivot to all virtual learning if the health circumstances require it. 

2: Teacher Support: Teachers who will be blending virtual and in-person instruction need ...

• Content that is designed for virtual/blended delivery. Few teachers have the time or expertise to create the depth and breadth of digital content that they will need to pull this off well. 
• Tools for collaboration and for creating simple content (e.g., simple instructional videos).
• Training in blended and virtual technology and pedagogy. Facilitating a course that depends on technology requires comfort with technology, but also with new pedagogical strategies. 
• Time to plan and collaborate with their colleagues. For instance, there is no reason that each English 10 teacher in a given school should create their own videos. They should be able to share the burden and stay in sync. 

A few quotes from teachers:

"Asking teachers to reinvent the curriculum for online delivery is impossible and a fools errand...will...not...happen."

"... Teachers want to be prepared to help their students should virtual learning continue but we need help."

"Registration for the FCPS Academy course on online teaching opened at midnight on June 15th. The two sections filled in less than 4 minutes!! It’s summer break and hundreds of teachers are up at midnight to register for a course so they can learn how to teach online. By mid-morning over 100 were waitlisted,"

Without all of these supports, the system will struggle again, student learning will suffer, and FCPS will lose many talented, devoted, but frustrated teachers. 

3: A Blended Model: The scenarios presented so far seem to be either fully virtual or fully (in terms of synchronous teacher support) face-to-face. What about a blended solution? For instance what about using a variation of Scenario 2:

• Monday and Tuesday: Half of students in school each day with 8-period day. 
• Wednesday: Virtual periods 1-4 synchronous online
• Thursday: Virtual periods 5-8 synchronous online
• Friday: Intervention block

Some advantages of this blended approach are: 

• More structured time for students. None of the proposed scenarios have students learning synchronously more than two days/week. My suggestion pushes it to three.
• Less in-person contact time so that health risks are reduced.
• Easy to pivot to fully online if health conditions change for the district or for a particular school, teacher, or student. 

4: Reaching Out for Guidance: K12, Inc.'s headquarters is right here in Fairfax County, and they have been doing virtual learning for close to two decades. K12's 100,000+ students include lots of ELLs and IEPs and special education and F&RL. It could make sense to get their input as you frame up virtual and blended solutions, including how to provide counseling, engage with families, and deal effectively with populations that have specific needs. K12 is far from perfect, but they have been doing virtual and blended learning for a long time, so they can probably help FCPS avoid some pitfalls.

Teach to One: Technology that Kills Learning Relationships

Teach to One Math is an exciting idea. What if computers could help students get a truly personalized learning experience? Their supporters include an amazing list of educational organizations for which I have great admiration and respect, including Gates, Chan Zuckerberg, New Profit, and Oak.

Hechinger Report published an interesting article a few years ago What happens when computers, not teachers, pick what students learn? that paints a picture of how Teach to One Math can look in a classroom. It's certainly innovative, and probably works for some kids and teachers, but I was skeptical.

When Open Culture published Trainwreck: The Teach to One Math Experiment in Mountain View, CA Is a Cautionary Tale About the Perils of Digital Math Education, more people took notice of the downside of Teach to One. Around the time the Open Culture article came out, I spoke with a teacher from a Teach to One school, and her comment was that she felt...

"... cut out of the process and overwhelmed at the same time."

I'm sure that computer-driven adaptivity has its place, but when those algorithms get in the way of effective teacher-student relationships, we have a problem.

Why mention this idea that is a few years old? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting more powerful and so people keep coming up ways that computers can improve teaching and learning. For instance, some of TeachThought's 10 Roles For Artificial Intelligence In Education have AI-driven systems re-framing the role of the teacher. Teach to One Math should be a cautionary tale that helps us evaluate huge shifts that could harm relationships between teachers and students.

Kinda Hip (But Preachy) Education Videos

Here are some videos that are intended to inspire.

Did You Know 4.0 (2009) inspired a series of Did You Know videos including Did You Know-The Future (2010), Did You Know 2016, Did You Know 2017, and Did You Know 2018.

A Vision of K-12 Students Today (2007) is supposed to "... inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways...."

I'm not a Luddite, but I reject the idea that teachers need to follow every technological fad. I also have solid research on my side when I say that providing instruction in the format that a learner chooses is not necessarily better for the learner ("Another Nail in the Coffin for Learning Styles..."). Yes, teachers need to evolve and use technology appropriately. They also need to understand their students and the ways they use technology. That said, it is a foolish teacher who tries to pander to their students' every whim.

Education Today and Tomorrow has interesting tidbits. In some ways, it doesn't seem that different from the previous video, but I like it far better. It seems less preachy and more inspiring.

Good teaching is about relationships and growth and passion. It's not about competing with an XBox.

Khan Revisited

A while ago, I wrote The Wrath of Khan (one of my favorite blog post titles).

What's changed since then? Quite a bit. First of all, Khan Academy (KA) is now the 400-lb gorilla of the free online instructional video space. Everyone knows them. I have spoken to several educators who have built courses that rely on heavy, daily doses of KA, but I also know others who seem to use Khan as an epithet. At times, it seems that KA is a bit of a pedagogical Rorschach test: How you view KA can say quite a bit about who you are as an educator.

My earlier post went into some of my concerns about KA, so what about some of the positives?

1. KA's integrated assessments help students see their progress. 
2. All of their content is free, pretty comprehensive, and generally fairly solid. 
3. One really interesting thing Khan has done is partnering with the folks at The College Board to provide customized SAT practice. They even have solid data that indicate the practice helps students raise their scores. Free SAT prep that actually shows improvement! Every HS student should be using this.

Khan isn't perfect, and can be over relied upon, but they are providing valuable services for free, and that's pretty great.

Constant Assessment: Making Data Useful

Assessment isn't about assigning a number to determine how a kid can perform on a particular day. Assessment is about figuring out what a kid does and doesn't understand (so far).

Actually, lots of assessment is about that first thing. Educators spend lots of time, energy, and money assigning numbers to kids. What about this: We shouldn't spend most of our assessment energy on the pedagogical equivalent of autopsies. We should spend more time developing, performing, and using formative assessments that help teachers teach and students learn.

In an earlier post, I said that we should assess more and test less. Here are a couple folks who have some ideas that seem related to this idea.

Bernard Bull (on Twitter @bdean1000) has Educational Publishers & Content Providers: The Future Is About Analytics, Feedback & Assessment, which puts the idea of a constant stream of assessment data into the proper context. It isn't about testing. It isn't about bypassing teachers. It's about using data to help students learn and teachers teach more effectively.

"... each action individually and collectively becomes a new data point that can be mined and analyzed for important insights."

His diagram showing how interactive content could be part of an effective part of a learning system is a call to action.

There's also Kristen DiCerbo's (on Twitter @kristendicerbo) work including these articles: How More Data Helps Us, Why an Assessment Renaissance Means Fewer Tests, All Fun & Games? Understanding Learner Outcomes Through Educational Games, and many others. I found Dr. DiCerbo's research when I searched Google for "invisible assessment," which is the same as what I have called "sneaky assessment." Whether it's "sneaky" or "invisible," this sort of assessment is where we should be headed.

eLearning content developers (such as myself) need to do a better job of making this happen, and teachers need to a) demand data-producing interactive content, and b) commit to really using it to help students learn more effectively.

Assess More; Test Less

Think about driving from Paris through pastoral northern France to Arromanches in Normandy.

If someone asked you how the drive was, would you simply report your successful, on-time arrival? Probably not. You'd probably mention the lovely scenery or how the trip made you feel or some other salient detail from the trip.

While you're on the drive, would you only care about your car's speed? Probably not. You'd also care about various aspects of your car's health as well (e.g., fuel level, engine temp, and RPM). If you don't pay attention to various aspects of your car's health, it could leave you stranded by the side of the road.

For years, online curriculum developers have focused on objective-driven courses. We measure how much content students have mastered, and we keep them aimed at consuming more content so they can master more content. We've been focused on the destination.

We need to spend more time thinking about the journey, and to do that, we need to make better use of modern technology and data. We need to stop testing so much, and start assessing more. Much more. Actually, we need to assess all the time. Let's group the kinds of things we should assess into two general categories:

Type 1 States: Content Knowledge and Readiness
These assessment are tied to specific objectives with a goal of mastery. We do a decent job of assessing content knowledge, but I don't think that many people do a robust enough job of assessing readiness. With tools like knowledge spaces, we should be able to figure out exactly what skills and knowledge a student needs to have in order to be ready to learn any topic. Why not figure that out ahead of time?

Type 2 States: Metacognition, Motivation, and Perseverance
As a student goes through any lesson, we should find ways to measure how they are reacting to the lesson. These three aspects go up and down through the course of a lesson, unit, and course. You don't master them any more than you master the fuel in your car's tank, but they are critical to engaging with content and truly mastering any field. Games and problem-based learning can be powerful tools for helping students learn skills, but perhaps they can be even more helpful when developing and measuring students' motivation and perseverance.

We need to measure Type 1 States frequently via truly formative assessment.

We need to measure Type 2 States continuously through every activity of a lesson.

Once we can measure both types of states well, we'll be able to help students learn and teachers teach more effectively.

Zoran Popovic: He's Got Games

This is the first in an occasional series on researchers I think are doing interesting work. Some will be well-known, but others might be somewhat less so. Regardless, I will share some thoughts on why more people should be putting this person's research into action. These aren't researchers who would only be interesting to someone working in an ivory tower. Each one does interesting work that you could use.

Dr. Zoran Popovic does a lot of work, but one thing he does really well is make games. As a matter of fact, he worked on algorithms that are used in the video game Destiny. He also cares quite a bit about how to help students. Notably, how to use hints to help students learn.

A Few of His Projects

Dr. Popovic runs the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington. CGS has done a bunch of good stuff including:

• FoldIt provides a context in which people with no knowledge of biochemistry can solve complex protein structure problems that help scientists solve real problems. It's actually pretty darn remarkable.
• Refraction is an interesting (and effective) way to learn fraction concepts and operations.
• DragonBox allows (even very young) students to learn algebra.

Popovic also runs a non-profit called EnLearn, which has built an adaptive learning platform. The EnLearn platform is not designed to replace teachers. It's designed to help them be more effective.

My Favorite Popovic Idea

So much to choose from, but I'm going geeky. I really like his Trace-based Framework for Analyzing and Synthesizing Educational Progressions. This reminds me of the Knowledge Spaces idea that lies behind ALEKS. It's computational and theoretical, but when you see it described well, it makes total sense. To a great extent, these traces are a big part of why EnLearn is so powerful.

Many people are making educational games and some people have built adaptive learning platforms, but very few people are doing either as well as Dr. Popovic and his teams.

The Wrath of Khan

With his tutorial videos, Khan Academy has made a big splash in the education world. Having Bill Gates sing your praises in a TED Talk is a sure way to get a lot of attention.

Over at Action-Reaction, Frank Noschese has an article Khan Academy: My Final Remarks. I agree with many of his points. Here is a quote from near the end of the post:

Khan Academy is just one tool in a teacher’s arsenal. (If it’s the only tool, that is a HUGE problem.) Khan Academy can be useful for some kids as a vehicle (build skills) to help them get to better places (solving complex problems).

Here are some other bloggers putting KA into some reasonable context:

• On his Quantum Progress blog, John Burk also chimed in with Project Euler vs Khan Academy: The Future of Online Learning.
• Mathalicious's blog has Socrates & C-3PO. 
• On his MAA blog Devlin's Angle, Professor Keith Devlin brings us The Difference Between Teaching and Instruction. 

It's comforting to see that I am not alone in thinking that if Khan is really the future of education, then we are in deep doodoo. Frankly, I would not really call Khan Academy’s stuff “education,” but rather would consider it “instruction.” If we turn education into nothing but a series of activities that a microchip can perform, then we are on a very dangerous path.

I don't mean to be a Khan basher. When using KA as a way to support struggling students, or as a way to help flip a classroom and allow teachers to focus on engaging with students, it can have great value. The Daily Riff has The Flipped Class Manifest, which provides some insights into how and when flipping a classroom can work, as well as a nice set of links to articles that provide more depth.

Back in 2007 (before I ever heard of Khan Academy), I started developing instructional videos that are somewhat similar to Khan’s work. I think they are great tools, but they are not the be-all and end-all of online education. We need to continue to innovate, but shouldn't get too carried away by the latest educational fad and think it will solve all our problems.