For the Greater Glory...On Means, Ends, and Lessons Learned from Robots

There is a Jesuit catchphrase for just about everything. One of the most common in educational circles is AMDG - an abbreviation for a latin phrase which translates to "For the Greater Glory of God". Many Jesuit schools require students to write this in the header of their papers, other schools have signs and posters, our school made it the student e-mail domain.

It's a big deal...

Interlude: What's in a Name?
Two months ago, a group of students decided to form a robot club. Their goal was to have Brebeuf Jesuit participate for the first time in the Indianapolis VEX robotics championships. This event, sponsored by the Mayor's office, offers free registration and robotics kits to any school willing to field a team.

As I was filling out the online registration, i was faced with a huge question: Team Name. I felt the cold sweat breaking out. This was HUGE. We needed something that could capture the spirit of our school, the care-free but driven attitude that made up our team, with just enough nerd-cred to show that we were the real deal. After a few panicked seconds I typed: AMDGeeks.
End Interlude.

This Saturday was the two-day culmination of our Robot Team's hard work. And it was pretty awesome:

Much has been written and will be written about the use of robots and practical "real-world" problem solving (and to be fair, i want to live in a world where building small-scale competitive robots is the "real-world" -- its like pokemon, but with robots). This is what I observed:

1. Problem Identification: What is the scope of the problem? What are resources available?
2. Complex, Strategic Thinking: Given the limitations in time and resources, what will be the best solution
3. Hypothesis Testing: Build it, test it, note the results, modify, try again.
4. Research: Yes, it started with YouTube and Google. But it also included talking to physics teachers, calling in experts in fields from welding to general construction.
5. Cooperation: Each team member had strengths that were drawn upon throughout the tournament. Each team was allied with one or more other robot teams for individual rounds.
6. Empathy, Emotional Control: Students were reading feelings, supporting one another, etc. 

Quite a bit different from your typical testing environment

A collection of corporate sponsors, educators, politicians and student-coaches, some as young as ten years old, were creating an environment that was a celebration of the development of college-preparatory and 21st century skills!

What struck me as I looked in the audience of hundreds of parents, students, teachers, administrators was the lack of teacher-evaluation. Stick with me here, this might be important:

iAspire: one of numerous
Teacher Evaluation Apps

• There was no principal in the stands of the Banker's Life Fieldhouse with an iPad App that allowed her to quickly check off the common core standards that were being met.
• There was no Lexile, no Acuity, no Terra Nova pre-test of cognitive potential.
• The only analytics collected were in service to teams figuring out from one round to the next what was working and not working...how to work with one team in an effort to defeat two more.

Yet, in this environment with all of its chaos and shouting and stress and fun, real learning was taking place. Students from a variety of backgrounds and schools were learning to work together, communicate effectively, and devise complex strategies to achieve a common goal.

• It was a demonstration of student learning and real-world application.
• It was the lived experience of preparation for 21st century skills.
• It was one of the best observable environments for implementation of many of the  common core state standards.

and yet...no evaluations were made and no test score was given.

AMDG, Common Core, and the Fight for Education

Critics of the Common Core State Standards are often painted as lazy educators who do not want their work held up to the scrutiny of science and data. Accusations often imply that any who do not support the CCSS and its integrated regime of corporate testing, textbooks, computer management systems, and teacher evaluation tools must not really want kids to succeed.

The problem that educators face in discussing this issue with politicians and parents are that the CCSS has become the ultimate goal of education -- education's AMDG. Anything that works toward the #CCSS (read, anything that is "COMMON CORE ALIGNED") is automatically GOOD because it works toward the ultimate goal. Anything that criticizes that ultimate goal is automatically EVIL.

This is what leads to the shock and almost dismissive attitude in state legislatures when teacher's try to explain the flaws in the CCSS-Testing regime. Because the CCSS has the mantle of the ultimate goal, the advocates for teachers, whether they are administrators or unions, are hesitant to go directly at the issue and instead beg for more time or increased professional development.

Educators and Parents and Politicians need to step back from the CCSS-Testing megalith and realize that despite the political spin that has deemed it as the ultimate goal -- it is actually a means to an end. In Fact, built within its purpose and rhetoric are the true ultimate goals of education according the CCSS's designers, the true ends: College and Career Readiness, Development of Leadership Potential, Citizenship.

In order to have a discussion about the role of robotics and STEM or times for reflection or appropriate use of lexiles or the need to read non-fiction vs. 18th century literature, teachers and parents and educators must first have a discussion about Goals and Ends for education. We need to discuss education's version of AMDG.

The common core state standards are a politically popular and well-funded MEANS to reach the end. Yet they are discussed as if they are the END itself. Common Core and its implementation (and all of the testing and data and expense that accompanies it) is a path, an interpretation about how to reach the ultimate goals of education. 

One can believe that the Common Core and its associated baggage is not the right direction for a school or state or nation without being against education itself. One can reject a particular MEANS without rejecting an separate END.

CCSS is not AMDG.

Need proof? Watch the robots.

(More on this tomorrow...)

Wishful Thinking and Misdirection: Indiana Common Core Advertisements

It has been an interesting Spring in Indiana. Usually, once election season dies down, I struggle to find good cannon fodder for my #digcit class to rip into outside of the school newspaper... Not so this spring.

The Indiana legislature is considering a bill that seeks to "press the pause button" on the Common Core State Standards. Watching the TV on the morning news, one would wonder why they would do this. A flood of commercials from two or three affiliates of national interest groups (and their deep-pocketed book publishing sponsors) have hit the airwaves demonizing anyone who would question the gospel of the common core.

As with most politically motivated ads, there is a ton of bad logic just waiting for a dissection. I am hoping to post a link to my favorite commercial soon, but two claims that are made are worth some preliminary analysis:

Claim #1:

Bad workforce readiness, the need for remedial education prior to college, and the popularity of reality TV are all a result of poor state standards in Indiana.

Ok, to be fair, I made one of those up.

The commercial does imply a causal link between the outgoing Indiana State Standards and the other two bad outcomes. It doesn't present any evidence or resources that this is the case. It doesn’t even show a statistical relationship between standards and outcomes (correlation). While flipping through my handy chart of logical fallacies, there are a lot of things that are close, but this may just be a case of WISHFUL THINKING.

Wishful thinking (which does fall under the category of "Appeal to Emotion"), is where we make decisions based on what is pleasing to imagine, rather than by evidence or reason (thanks, Wikipedia). It is nice to believe that simply adopting a common set of items to memorize, concepts to learn, and skill sets to practice will solve all of our educational problems. Imagine a world where we adopt the standards, implement a little professional development and *POOF* test scores increase (don’t laugh too hard, I have #edtech mailings promising that). The implication in the commercial is that the only reason why we have not had decent international test scores is that we were teaching Polar Coordinates while the rest of the world was using the much more advance Euclidean Geometry!

It's not that simple.

Think of the complexity between these allegedly "bad standards" and a student, ready for college. There are teachers and their lessons (this is the whipping-person of choice for the union-busting #edreform movement). Student motivation and even attention can be impacted by poverty (one of the factors that actually has some correlating research). The international tests could ask questions that are unrelated to what is being taught (or even what is in the standards themselves).

Standards are a starting link in a very long, complicated chain that is modern education. To imply this level of direct causation is insulting to parents, students, legislators and teachers...It also assumes that the standards are actually better.

Claim #2:
The Common Core State Standards are Better than the Current Indiana Standards

In order to believe that the Common Core has magical curative effects on education, the CCSS should be better than the current Indiana standards. Certainly the commercial implies this.

(Note: A more complicated argument would have been that there is a benefit to standards crossing state borders which is over and above the quality of the standards themselves. A ridiculous argument would claim that all of the for-profit companies making a mint from a market expansion coupled with a reduced need for product variety will happily reinvest those profits to hire back veteran teachers or bring back libraries and extra-curriculars -- it is more likely that they would just make some more Youtube videos)

But, and this is important, they are not better.

The Fordham Institute conducted a comparative analysis of English and Mathematics standards between the two. The "old standards" score a 7/7 for content and rigor in both categories. Regarding English, they pointed out that Indiana standards were "clearer, more thorough, and easier to read", a significant detail when creating a document that will be translated into student learning objectives and assessment items. The Institute's blog puts it bluntly:

"There’s no doubt that Indiana, all by itself, had devised some of the best English (and math) standards in the land; indeed, drafters of the Common Core would have done well to plagiarize even more of the Hoosier State’s fine work." - Chester E. Finn, Fordham Institute*

It is easy to visualize that in the creation of across-the-board standards, some states will improve and some (like Indiana, Massachusetts, and California) will stay the same or take a step backwards. The commercial uses its thirty seconds of airtime to hammer at the idea that the Indiana standards were bad and that it was this "badness" that caused the problems we now face. While that is a much simpler stance to take, it is wrong.

• It is wrong to create commercials that draw false causality and overly simplify complicated matters
• It is wrong to treat education as a political football while accusing others of doing the same.
• It is wrong to feed vague logical fallacies to parents and voters without disclosing information that would help understand the issues at stake better.

Ultimately, whether Indiana adopts the Common Core State Standards or sticks with the Indiana State Standards that were significantly revised in the last decade (yes, the current standards have not even made it through a single K-12 cycle), the state will have independently validated "good" standards. 

But it is important for parents, and voters, and legislators to understand that this is a much more complicated issue than that which is being framed in the public discourse. There are a lot of players with deep pockets who are not completely altruistic in their desire to improve the United States education system. 

• We need to take a moment to understand the issues.
• We need to reflect on the complex connections at play between corporations, State Education Boards, Schools, and classrooms.
• We need to press pause, because the Common Core is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Up Next: Putting the Brakes on Innovation - What we know about the PARCC Assessment

* A few notes about the Fordham Institute's analysis: First, they do note that there was room for improvement in both the English and especially the Mathematics standards from Indiana. This fact is referred to on the stand.org's "Myths vs. Facts" website. Corresponding improvements that could be made to strengthen the common core are ignored by that same site. (this website also has an OUTRAGEOUS "but you didn't answer the question" dodge in its Myth #2. Classic Straw Man).  

* Second, not to misrepresent their stance, the Fordham Institute is an advocate of the common core and praises Indiana's adoption of it. The Institute does not claim, as the commercials do, that Indiana's standards were the cause of the Hoosier state's educational ills. They assert among other things that there are benefits in comparing performance across state lines and that there is a huge potential cost saving for all of those poor impoverished publishers and test-makers.

Competing for their Hearts and Minds -- #Digcit Thoughts from a RoadTrip Vacation

My wife and I are taking the family on one of those road trips that seem to be a necessary  rite of passage of raising-a-young-family that no one can explain. This post is a collection of reflections made on the journey -- Because you can take the #edtech geek out of the school, but you can't take the school out of the #edtech geek.

Different Tools, Different Data, Different Results
On day three of our journey, we are planning on driving from Atlanta, GA to Raleigh, NC. My wife has been referring to the 4.5 hr journey for a few days, but when talking to our relative in NC, she says it is closer to six hours. She says "But mapquest said it was 4 and a half."

I pull out my Nexus 7 and ask Google Now for a map to Raleigh: Six hours and 15 minutes.

My wife (annoyed): "But why would it change? I Googled it just a few days ago!"
Me (in interesting-conversation-about-tech-mode when I should have been in husband-consoling-wife-who-has-had-her-plans-derailed-mode): I thought you said you had used Mapquest?
Wife (now annoyed at me): I used something. Why would they be different?

...and while i could think of all sorts of reasons for differences including accuracy of routes, real-time information (those cool Google cars), differing calculation methods, real-time traffic or construction updates (not to mention any number of human error issues), I had picked up on the fact that this was NOT the conversation my vacation planner and mother of my children wanted to have...but it got me thinking.

The Information Conundrum

Waze Crowd-sourced mapping

What my wife experienced  is an increasingly common occurrence  People in stop-and-go traffic who pull up
a traditional GPS will often be frustrated by a red (slow) traffic line, but little information. But if that same person is using an app called WAZE, they can get minute-by-minute updates from real users, including the guy 2 miles ahead saying "they have the semi off the road now. traffic should start moving any minute." And while mapping and travel seem to be one of the easy highlights (Apple's early foray's into maps was well-documented as one of the companies few but often entertaining stumbles), there are a number of areas where we are beginning to see this issue arise for our students.

The internet houses websites and blogs galore which at first glance can appear to have valid information. However, as the ease of creating and distributing information has increased, we have not had a corresponding rise in our capacity as humans to filter through this information and distinguish bad information from good. And this is not just a situation created by the rise of the blogosphere.

Billboards and Displays of Competing World Views
As we are travelling down the highway on the way to Raleigh, I see a billboard that shows a caveman fighting/running from an old-style Tyrannosaurus Rex (you can tell older depictions from the positioning of the tail. If it drags on the ground Godzilla-style, its based on older anthropological models). It is an advertisement for a Creationist Museum - a concept I am familiar with due to our proximity to one in Kentucky -- I just didn't realize that they had franchised.

The newest creation museum advertising eliminates the "controversy"
in favor of the draw of Dinosaurs. Thunder lizards are cool.

There are currently 16 Creationist Museums. These museums are typically privately funded with a

combination of models, animatronic displays, professionally produced videos and interactive activities typical of the modern museum experience. In fact, the many of the museums get high reviews from visitors and have been featured as tourist destination highlights. What is noteworthy about these museums is that the exhibits are based on young-earth/creationism interpretations of the origin of life and the planet.

The "Come Meet Your Relatives" sign outside the
Mammal wing of the Museum of Natural History

Either the Earth is 4.54 Billion years old or it's 6,000 years old. Relativism, while popular as a moral stance (that will be a rant for another day), is not as easily applied to geology.

But thousands of people a year visit these museums that cost millions of dollars in order to learn from what National Center for Science Education director Eugene Scott called " the Creationist Disneyland". The discussion that ensued in the car-ride ranged from young-earth positions, to carbon dating, to evolution and catholic teaching. It led to one of our daughters pointing out the number of evolution references made at the Smithsonian Museum for Natural History (although the Gem displays were the biggest hit).

The point here is not good science vs. bad science. (see the original #savethedinosaurs post for some of that). There are two highly funded competing world views fueled by scientific method, research, religion, morality and money that are vying for the eyes, hearts, and minds of our students.

• What are the specific skills that students need to develop in order to function in this world of competing information and data?
• Regardless of the status of the Common Core and its corporate sponsored testing offspring, what should schools be doing to put in place the development of these skills and habits-of-mind? 
• At what age do our students have to develop the capacity to use their skills and capacity for rational thought to determine which of these world views they will subscribe to and follow?

#Edtech, #Digcit, and #BYOT -- Identifying the Essential Skills
1. Claim and Analysis: Students must be able to find factual claims within a piece of writing, be it a tweet, Facebook vanity card, news article, or research paper. They should be able to identify and evaluate the supporting evidence (or in most cases lack thereof) which supports the claim.

Practically Applied: We use the student newspaper. Preliminary questions we ask are:

• Do you trust this source? 
• What reasons do you have in-source for this trust? 
• What reasons do you have beyond the source for this trust?

2. Identifying Assumptions: World views are loaded with assumptions of truth. Identifying these assumptions and treating them as claims that can also be analyzed for support is a key activity in the high-data, conflicting conclusion modern age. The process of uncovering assumptions can be difficult to teach/learn, in part because human brains use assumptions to process data efficiently in the best of situations (and with all of the data produced in the world today, it is NOT the best of situations.

Practically Applied: Use a series of regressive questions as part of the research process when students are beginning to identify primary research questions and problems:

• What is the problem that you have identified?
• Why is that a problem?
• What information do you need to formulate a solution?
• What sources can provide that information?
• Are there experts in the area who believe that it is not a problem?
• What are their reasons for believing it is not a problem?

3. Closed Systems of Information, Silo Thinking, and Confirmation Bias: The goals of hardware, software, and information providers in the modern business-oriented world is lock-in. This is the tendency to go to the same well for information and solutions. Again, this is an aspect of human nature - habits help solve recurring problems efficiently. Thus, Google wants you to constantly go to its website for the answer. Apple and Amazon are both creating stores of information and data access so that you never have to go to the Big-G for an answer. Fox, MSNBC, CNN are all competing for your eyeballs, your homepage, your attention and your trust. As you spend more time within one system, you find that the answers reinforce eachother on two levels: All of the answers seem to tie together, painting a coherent view of reality and all indications then seem that this source of information is a good source to rely upon in the future.

Practically Applied: Teach social media as a tool and not a distraction. Students should be working from a young age to a) question the reliability of information sources and b) build a system of information sources that intentionally have multiple viewpoints, biases, and information.

An early social network activity we use is to identify social media sources within a student's personal network. Count the number of friends, relatives, celebrities, news sources. Then rank those sources along different perspectives such as politics (conservative/liberal, Big/Small government), religious perspective, value of formal education, etc. Many of our students find that they are likely to have a network that feeds their own pre-existing world view and that the ideas presented are strikingly similar across social media.


4. Variety of Tools and Sources. An unanticipated side-effect of the 1:1 BYOT implementation at the school is the in-depth discussions about methodology, whether it is for creating a presentation or finding information. In a world where each student brings a device and the device is the choice of the family/student, there are a lot of tools in each classroom. Students begin to discuss and share problem-solving strategies naturally and teachers can foster this sharing with directed activities.

Practically Applied: Focus on process over product. Have students keep a process journal as part of each major assignment. Use the journal as a part of reflective and sharing activities. As different conclusions are reached, the student's become better equipped to un-pack how they reached a specific answer and why that answer was different from the conclusion of another member of the class.

On Reflection
None of these applications are easy and very few of them can be answered with a click or a filled-in bubble.We have found that the amount of time we spend on individual projects grows as we add in time to use regressive questioning in the beginning and time to pair-and-share process reflections in the drafting stage of papers and presentations.

But this is a part of the answer to the issue of information overload and over-reliance on data-without-depth.

Our call as educators is to helps student identify not just the correct answers to the questions on a test but the underlying systems that produced those questions-and-answers in the first place. Corporations  governments, and organizations are all to willing to have reliable consumers and followers.

We should accept nothing less than independent thinkers.
Our children deserve it.

More than just a consumer and political pawn

On Vivid Descriptions and Big Tents: Breaking Down the Claim for Fewer Teachers

An analysis of the most recent attack on teachers -- that there are just too many of them.


for those of you who have watched the new Jen and JD Show or followed the blog/twitter, you'll know that a recurring theme in my thought process is my slightly shocked reaction to the attack on teachers in recent years. Given that teachers are not a strong political group, that the unions in general have lost their power, and that ready-made scapegoats are much easier to attack than issues like poverty or cycles of illiteracy, it should not be surprising that sound-byte culture has taken the stance that teachers are to blame. It is slightly more frustrating that both big-tent political parties have taken this position to some extent by placing faith in high-stakes tests and business-centered competition rhetoric, but we are past the stage where we can look to any political party to speak out in the name of educators.


So it falls to educators to call "foul" and get the word out.


This is not going to be an easy task. The news is not going to cover it. The sunday morning talk shows don't have a place for an educator's voice (although they seem to always have seats for multimillionare businessmen), and the most powerful bully pulpits are reserved for talks about "filling in ovals completely and dark" as the pathway to educational heights of performance ecstasy.


So let's take the arguments one at a time. Blog, write, advocate through social media, and begin to change the conversation around at the grass roots level. Because, and this may be important: teachers, as a group, know how to educate children. We know what works and what doesn't. We know how to fix problems that happen. We know what bad teaching looks like and, in general, call it out to administrators.


We care about our students. We care about them even when they frustrate us. We care about learning. We care about it in spite of all of the barricades that the Federal and State governments and their puppet masters the book publishers and large corporations put in our way. 


On Fewer Teachers -- The Premise


The latest attack that is gaining traction in the political discourse claims that we need fewer teachers. The claim seems to be taking a few different forms and is based on the generalizing "well everyone know that..." down-home rhetoric that appeals to people who will only consider a sound-byte and not dig deeper. Eventually we need to come up with a good counter-soundbyte, but until that time, I want to pick apart the argument a little.


New Hampshire Governor, John Sununu, seems to be one of the many voices spearheading this argumentation. The mass appeal whips up fervor over smaller government, fewer public employees, etc. Naturally, since many teachers are public employees, they fall into this group. What is astounding is the reasoning behind it:

There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population. And as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers...If there’s fewer kids in the classrooms, the taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers. [...] You have a lot of places where that is happening. You have a very mobile country now where things are changing. You have cities in this country in which the school population peaked ten, 15 years ago. And, yet the number of teachers that may have maintained has not changed. I think this is a real issue. And people ought to stop jumping on it as a gaffe and understand there’s wisdom in the comment.

ThinkProgress has the full article and includes video for those of you skittish about the bias of a liberal news source (of course, if you fall into that category, you have probably already stopped reading, which is part of the confirmation-bias issues that we need to address in our #digcit classes with the next generation).

 So, let's break down the Sununu quote, acknowledging that he may have deeper analysis that did not come out in this interview, but holding him accountable as a taxpayer making public statements to a wide audience:

Population is going down: His first argument is one of simple arithmetic. If we need X number of teacher per Y number of students. When the number of students goes down, the number of teachers should go down. -- Its so simple that absolutely no one could disagree, right? There are a few problems with the premise of the claim though:

Keeping it in Context -- A disjointed rant about getting along, the common core, dreaming big.

One of the things that I absolutely love about my job is that, in its present form, I have the time and the ability to meet with other geeks, #edtechs, and teachers and talk about improving schools for everyone.

I have worked with public and private schools.
I have consulted with large and small corporations.
I have recommended 1:1 chromebooks, and carted laptop models, and my beloved BYOT

In one rare case, I was even asked to help shape a professional development plan for a 1:1 iPad implementation that would be starting in less than 4 months (and to the credit of my previous speech coaches and directors, I did not even crack a smile, let alone say:
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING! I AM BEING IRONIC WHEN I SAY THAT THE FLUTTER OF #SHINYPRETTY ANGEL WINGS WILL WAFT MAGIC VALUE-ADDED PIXIE DUST ONTO THE EYES OF ALL OF YOUR STUDENTS)

I consider this consultation experience educational for me, helpful for others, and part of my mission in life as both an educator and a Jesuit employee (we are meant to serve and work to bring about the greater glory of God, afterall).

So it is somewhat surprising to me when I review some of the twitter #hashtag PD chats that I have participated in and read some of the blogs and news articles and e-mails from THE_Journal's partners that insist there is an absolute right way to do technology -- my favorite of that last group being an email with the subject "BYOT is coming" -- sent to advertise a webinar about centralized control for Apple Tablet roll-outs.

We have let go of one essential part of the educational experience: CONTEXT.

In the Jesuit educational system, everything starts with context. The relationship between the teacher and the student is supposed to mirror the relationship between a spiritual director and someone on a prayerful retreat -- guiding the learner, advising based on the experiences at the moment but ALSO based on the experiences that that are being brought from the outside and from the past.

Context: What has been learned? How does each child learn?