"Hey, you good?"

"It was a terrible pass.

Connor Cook knew it as he walked off the field; his back turned to a replay of the pass playing over and over from every possible angle above Michigan State's end zone.

Mark Dantonio knew it as he saw his quarterback slowly walk toward the sideline, his head slightly hung after he looked up at the scoreboard.

Cook, Michigan State's sophomore quarterback, was driving the Spartans near midfield with a little more than two minutes left in the first half and in position to either tie the game with a field goal or take the lead with the touchdown. Instead, he panicked when Stanford defensive back Usua Amanam blitzed him off the corner and he lofted a picture-perfect pass to Stanford linebacker Kevin Anderson, who ran it back 40 yards untouched for a touchdown.

It was the kind of play that usually turns the tide of a game.

"It did. But in a direction that would surprise everyone not standing on Michigan State's sideline.

"Cook had already thrown two other passes that could have easily met the same fate but didn't when they inexplicably went through the hands of Stanford defenders. It was understandable to wonder if the pressure of playing in the Rose Bowl was getting to Michigan State's 20-year-old quarterback.

"So as Cook walked toward the sideline, Dantonio met him and asked him what he normally asks him when he throws a bad pass: "You good?"

'"Coach D was just giving me this look, and I was hoping he wasn't going to be super-upset and say something to put me down," Cook said. "Coach D does a great job of just having a good relationship with all of his players no matter what. If you do something stupid, he's not going to degrade you, he's not going to yell at you, so I walked off the field and he said, 'Hey, you good?' I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm fine.' I gave him a little fist pump. Everything was good after that."' [ESPN blog]




OK, yes, I am a Michigan State fan, a very loyal one, even if I think the graduate programs in the MSU College of Education are often dangerous to the health and welfare of children in the United States and around the world. But aside from that I think MSU is a great university, from its deep respect for the land-grant university traditions, to its campus full of the most amazing range of incredible programs. And one of the programs on that campus in East Lansing is the set of "varsity" sports - Basketball, Hockey, Football, Swimming, Soccer, et al. These sports, yes, cost far too much, pay (some) coaches way too much, and at times twist campus priorities in ways that should, at least, annoy any educator. And yet, at their best, they can inspire, they can unify a community, and they can teach...

And on New Year's Day in Pasadena, California, educators everywhere could find a vital lesson in the moment described above. And even with my delight in the athletic accomplishment... a great win in a great game against a great opponent... my greater delight is in what Michigan State football coach Mark Dantonio explained to too many teachers, too many administrators, and almost every "edu-politician" from Bill Gates to Michael Gove to Arne Duncan: failure by our students is OK, failure by our students is part of education, failure by our students is not only the only way to help them succeed, it is the only reason we teachers and administrators have jobs.

"he's not going to degrade you, he's not going to yell at you..." he's not going to "lower your grade," or "retain you," or drop you out of the "honors courses." "He," that is, a real educator, is going to treat you with human respect, support you, and ask you to give it another try. And wow, you see, that seems to work out. The Michigan State University football team picked itself up from disaster and completed a season in which, essentially, everybody received an "A." Everybody, including seniors Andrew Maxwell - who lost the quarterbacking job early in the year but was rewarded for his efforts by getting game appearances in both the Big Ten Championship and The Rose Bowl - and Max Bullough - the defensive captain suspended for this game and sent home who nonetheless cheered his teammates on from afar.

QB Andrew Maxwell is in the record
books - Dantonio put him in Spartans
last 2 games.

"The 13-acre Bullough estate, which sits atop a hill that overlooks West Arm Grand Traverse Bay and is marked by a Michigan State flag in the driveway, was still glowing with Christmas lights Friday evening."

I just see so many crucial things here. Because, sadly in the MSU College of Education, I was criticized for "giving out too many As" in courses I taught. "Really," I would say, "isn't that my goal an A for every kid? What kind of a teacher would I be if had any other goal?" And because sadly, across America and too much of the world, we believe that failure should always have costly imposed consequences. We have a whole group of idiots (my term for them) who believe that third graders who struggle with reading need to be punished. We have a world full of leaders - and again sadly, teachers as well - who think failure on a test, in a course, on an f---in' homework assignment, requires punishment.

An opposite tack: An educator was so proud of this
incredibly insulting sign he Tweeted it -
Can his students limit his wardrobe?
If he had real relationships with his kids,
would he need this sign?

I see far too many classrooms where the simple lessons Mark Dantonio knows go un-understood. Just as I was writing this a woman with a doctorate in "educational leadership" from Seattle University went on Twitter arguing that demeaning and insulting children with signs as they walk into a classroom is 'good for them' (assuming they have grown up poor).

"He's not going to degrade you, he's not going to yell at you,' said Cook about Dantonio, and we really don't need to explain the why of this, do we? There is only one ethical code of human conduct, not one for adults and one for children, not one for teachers and one for students, not one for elites and another for people born powerless.

And we teach effectively, we teach well, when we act as if there is one system, and we approach relationships and our work with each other as human-to-human interactions, not moments to exercise our momentary positional power.

"So I walked off the field," Cook said, "and he said, 'Hey, you good?' I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm fine.' I gave him a little fist pump." Young kid in his (not quite) first full season playing college football and veteran, million-dollar-making football coach. There could have been a whole lot of positional power exercised there, we've seen that a lot watching American college games, but here, there was none.

Rutgers University's (ex) Basketball Coach thought differently than Dantonio...

...a generational divide? or is it about human dignity?
"after all, its not about how many times you get knocked down,
its about how many times you get back up."

But in that moment Mark Dantonio taught Connor Cook one more amazing lesson, not just in football, in life, in leadership. And he established a level of trust which lies behind every successful educational outcome. Cook trusts his teacher, the Spartans trust their teachers, and from that point, the sky is the limit for any student.

Do the moments in your school look like this? And if you say, "no, but... we've got all these pressures, the tests, kids coming from poverty..." consider that the Cook/Dantonio moment came in the midst of just a bit of pressure as well...

- Ira Socol

Please Mayor DeBlasio... Please Governor Malloy... Please Governor McAuliffe... Please...

It is time to stop the abuse of children for profit. I cannot say it any more clearly than that.

It is time to stop the abuse of children for profit.

Perhaps, if you are an American political leader, say a President or something, you personally have not walked through enough schools and watched enough children...

...though I suspect that Mayor-in-a-month DeBlasio and Governor Malloy and Governor-in-a-month McAuliffe all have in recent years. And so, if you walk through those halls, you know what we've been doing to children, you know the harm we have been doing to children, over the past 30 years, and especially the last 15, and especially the last five.

We haven't just been making children cry. We haven't just been scaring them. We haven't just been stealing their resources to enrich a few adults. We have been limiting their educations, and thus, their opportunities.

What is the definition of child abuse? I'm not going overboard here to suggest that the policies promoted by ALEC, Pearson, the Gates Foundation, and implemented by Arne Duncan, Mike Bloomber, Jeb Bush, and others do indeed constitute emotional and psychological abuse and denial of equal opportunity.

The testing which has destroyed our schools, and which has crushed the spirit of our children, and which has wrecked, in many cases, our children's love of learning, has no actual validity... it measures nothing of consequence. The imposed, even scripted (in New York City's case), curricula of the Common Core and its relatives, does nothing to build an educated society, but rather, limits the engagement and interest and intellectual diversity of our children. The attacks on those of us who are "different" - especially those of us who are dyslexic and ADHD (I'm looking at you, Common Core advocates and Virginia leaders) - are cruel and in my mind, constitutionally unfair.

Now what should school look like? This isn't rocket science Mr. Mayor, Governors. We know that first, we need to engage learners. Unengaged learners are, definably, not learners. Second, we need to toss our "grade level standards," and every test which goes with them, out the window. Grade level standards are designed - from the very start - to fail children, not help them succeed. They are based in the absurd fiction that all humans learn all things at the same rate. And that fiction is why those who created grade level standards and age-based grades at the start, did so in order to flunk out 80% of children before ninth grade began (five part series).

Ninth Grade English learning plot development

Then we need to Universally Design our schools, so we are assessing - and yes, we are smart enough to assess without bad tests - abilities and capabilities, not disabilities and human differences.

Through contemporary technologies and loads of free software choices (consider just the Freedom Stick Suite, it's free), with One-To-One computer initiatives based in student choice, with contemporary learning space design, and with teacher professional learning aimed at the creation of creative, informed, empathetic professionals. we can - we have proven that we can - develop schools which maximize the potential of every child, and that we can do that without breaking any banks (the savings on Pearson et al will get us half way there, the stopping of worksheet printing will generate the other half of the money we need).

Third Grade Writers

So this is a desperate plea to our leaders. New leaders and continuing leaders. Let's put a stop to more than a century of Industrial Education. Let's stop treating our children as the raw materials ready for the "value added" assembly line which will turn them into identical widgets for jobs which no longer exist. Let's stop assaulting our children with tests which do not help them learn and which do not help us help them learn.

Let us remake education as something humane and holistic. As something inspiring and committed to real human development.

You are leaders, please, lead. Starting right now.

Sixth Grade Writers

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - Elwood Cubberley's dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson at the University of Virginia, 1905, and in various other addresses

"Richard Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee and one of the country's most recognized experts on early literacy, calls the accommodation [use of Text-To-Speech technology for dyslexic students] "cheating." - EducationWeek

 - Ira Socol

The Wilful Ignorance of Richard Allington

Initials after your name don't make you smart, or worthwhile to society. That's always been the problem with the credentialist society of the past 150 years. People with doctorates, for example, hand out doctorates, and maybe they do so in ways which limit intellectual and career competition.

Anyway, this is largely my case against our colleges and schools of education. Credentials trump knowledge, credentials trump experience, credentials trump value to our children in many of our "hallowed halls" of academe.

This fact appeared again - powerfully - in an EdWeek story about that impending bane of children of America, the Common Core test and its refusal to treat read-aloud - Text-To-Speech - as a fully equal testing regime for students with dyslexia. The key part of the story for me was a stunning ignorant and offensive statement from, yes, a professor of education:

"Richard Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee and one of the country's most recognized experts on early literacy, calls the accommodation "cheating."

'"What special education does best is create illiterates," Mr. Allington said. "I know why they don't want their kids tested on reading activity. It's because they've done a terrible job of providing those kids with high-quality reading instruction."' - EdWeek

So, in a national educational publication, this "Doctor," this "Professor," is willing to call me - and millions like me - an "illiterate cheater," and he thinks that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say about a person, about people, he knows absolutely nothing about. In response, on Twitter, I called him a "moron" in the best slang use of the term - but here's the difference. From these quotes, I know a great deal about Richard Allington, and I know he is dangerous.

Corrected http://t.co/cFHzVwhUmB this moron from U Tennessee is dangerous #a11y
— Ira Socol (@irasocol) November 2, 2013

Dangerous because he is willing to mix his position of credentialed authority, and control over who becomes a teacher (and perhaps PhD) from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, with his desire for fame, with wilful ignorance and a firm disrespect for humanity.

Dr. Richard Allington:
Please take his glasses away,
accommodations are cheating

Whatever Allington's credentials - and he claims an awful lot on his web page and - I'm sure - his office walls...

"Dick Allington is professor of education at the University of Tennessee. Previously he served as the Irving and Rose Fien Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Florida, and as chair of the Department of Reading at the University at Albany – SUNY.
   "Dick has served as the President of the International Reading Association, as President of the National Reading Conference, and as a member of the International Reading Association Board of Directors. He is the co-recipient of the Albert J. Harris Award from IRA in recognition of his work contributing to the understanding of reading and learning disabilities and the William S. Gray Citation of Merit for his contributions to the profession. In addition Dick has been named to the IRA Reading Hall of Fame.
  "Dick currently serves on the editorial boards of Reading Research Quarterly, Remedial and Special Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Disability Policy Studies, and the Journal of Educational Psychology. He has previously served terms on the editorial boards of the Review of Educational Research, Elementary School Journal, and the Reading Teacher, and as associate editor of the Journal of Literacy Research."

... he has proved to be an irresponsible person to have within the field of education, because he is willing to hurt children in the pursuit of his career.

In order to make the statements he made, this "Doctor" has to be willing to ignore almost all the actual brain research of the past fifteen years, everything we now know from genetics research around the world and fMRI research. This is probably OK with him because if there is one thing most education graduate programs teach it is to pick and choose research which supports your initial biased guess (called a "hypothesis" in the Alice in Wonderland research paradigm of education). And he probably believes he can get away with slandering a wide group of people because his "credentialed status" labels him as an expert.

Now, "Doctor" Allington, who appears to cheat using accommodations daily (if photos can be believed), also proves himself a hypocrite of the first order, accepting a solution for his inabilities as "normal" - his prescriptive eyeglasses - but seeing solutions for the inabilities of others - the digital reading support and audiobooks I use - as "cheating" and proof of illiteracy.

This "illiterate cheater" will be happy to debate the issues
of contemporary literature with "Doctor" Allington

Now, "Doctor" Allington and I can agree on the shortcomings of much of Special Education - it does, all too often, breed dependence. But the difference is that while my response is respect for, and the attempt to empower those students within the Special Ed-Industrial Complex, his solution is to blame them for their genetically differing brain structures, and to insist that they become just like him.

Now, since "Doctor" Allington has called me a "cheater" and "illiterate" - let me list my credentials - and I will argue that these are contemporary - post-Gutenberg - credentials. Sure "Doctor," I struggle mightily with decoding alphabetical text, and sure, unless I am drawing my letters, copying them in fact, my writing is just about useless, and - well, to go further, I've never learned to "keyboard" with more than one finger. So yes, "Doctor," by your standards I can neither read nor write. And to get around that I do indeed "cheat." I use digital text-to-speech tools, from WYNN to WordTalk to Balabolka to Click-Speak and I use audiobooks all the time, whether from Project Gutenberg or LibriVox or Audible. Yes, I "cheat" by writing with Windows Speech Recognition and Android Speech Recognition and the SpeakIt Chrome extension.

Hey "Doctor," we put these "cheating" tools on computers for every child.

And "Doctor," I not only use them, I encourage students all over the United States, all around the world in fact, to cheat with these tools as well. I've even helped develop a free suite of tools for American students to support that "cheating."

But beyond that, I'll match my scholarship with "Doctor" Allington's anytime, including my "deeply read" knowledge of the history of American education, and my "actual" - Grounded Theory Research - with real children in real schools in real - non-laboratory, non-abusive-control-group - situations.

And beyond that, I tend to think I'm as "well read" as any non-literature major around. So if the "Doctor" wants to debate James Joyce or Seamus Heaney or current Booker Prize shortlist fiction, or argue over why American schools often teach literature and the real part of reading, the understanding - so badly, I think I'll be able to hold my own.

Finally, in terms of recognition and accomplishment, well, for over 15 years I've been making real differences in the lives of people - from creating one of the earliest universally designed university campus computer networks at Grand Valley State University in the last century, to working for over a decade with children and adults through Michigan's Vocational Rehabilitation agency, to supporting the universal design and assistive technology initiatives of many K-12 schools, to research and teaching at Michigan State, to my present work in Virginia, and I have shared this work and knowledge base freely, never putting anything behind paywalls which might limit the access of teachers and students to essential information. And thanks to contemporary forms of social media, people know what I do.

Perhaps I should mention the books this illiterate has written - cheating with Speech Recognition, and oh yeah, spellcheck too, and WYNN for editing help - but, that's just extra...

I list my credentials not to compete, but to suggest that I have a deep kind of knowledge of these issues which is quite different from the knowledge listed on the "Doctor's" CV. It is a kind of "street," on-the-ground knowledge not available to university office researchers. And a prime part of that difference is that I deal with humans, and human brains, and human learning, and not just data points.

And with that knowledge, I would like to challenge "Doctor" Allington to a debate. We can do it in person or we can do it via those contemporary technological affordances, but we should do it in public, with the largest audience we can get.

I will ask the "Doctor" to explain and defend his definitions of "cheating," "illiteracy," "literacy," and "reading." And he can ask me whatever he wants. I will challenge his knowledge of contemporary research, and he is welcome to challenge mine.

I will ask him about his willingness to assault children in public by labelling them as he has done, and he can surely challenge my use of the term "moron" as it relates to him, and my use of "quotation marks." But I think that "Doctor" Allington should answer me before he steps back into any University of Tennessee classroom, or talks to any more future teachers.

Reading and Writing - "Reading is getting information from a recorded source into
your brain in a way which allows you to work with it. Writing is getting information
from your brain into a form which can be accessed asynchronously."

In the end our children deserve not just our respect but every opportunity we can give them. They also deserve respect for their differences, and must not be forced into conformity. Perhaps they need this most from those who claim the right to prepare our future teachers. Perhaps they do not need "credentialist experts" insulting them and attempting to deny them opportunities - especially those "experts" who have actual power over what the user experience of our students will be.

So, "Doctor" Allington, join me on an international stage, and let's let the world understand your argument, and let's let the world decide whether you get to keep using technology to fix that eyesight of yours.

- Ira Socol

Making Learning Spaces: The Secondary Library

If our schools are filled with "teaching places" instead of "learning spaces," what are we doing to change that?

All of us. What are we doing? Because whether you are in a national government, or you're a school superintendent, or principal, or teacher, you can be changing things, if that's what you want to do.

I had to write about this because of what happened with a Tweet from my friend William Chamberlain:

Choices in seating, in seating height, in gathering or hiding, and yes, fireplaces,
all make the typical recent McDonald's interior a far better learning space than most classrooms.

"McDonald's has better learning spaces than most schools," Chamberlain wrote, and, of course, he is right. Dozens of teachers joined in and retweeted this which is good, except.. when we tried to shift the conversation to what teachers might do, there was far less uptake. Now, I'm all for complaining, I do plenty of it myself, but honestly, if your classroom sucks as a learning space... fix it.

Fixing it... third grade teacher Derk Oosting doesn't wait, he acts

"Fixing it" doesn't always require money or getting new things, it often requires more subtraction than addition, getting rid of desks and miserably uncomfortable classroom chairs. Kids prefer floors anyway, whether its kindergarten or university. "Fixing it" mostly requires a mindset built around the ideas of "Choice and Comfort" and "Instructional Tolerance" and "Universal Design."

We remove the cultural expectations which have nothing to do with how humans learn. We remove the cultural and religious expectations of discomfort as some sort of positive. We remove ourselves as arbiters of some sort of schoolhouse propriety. And in doing so, we enable our children to find their own paths to success in school and in life.

Interlude: the eyes of a designer

Click 53rd and Park, New York City to get to this intersection in Google Earth.

There is a problem here, of course, which lies with the way educators are educated. They are not, unless their career paths have taken them far from "education," trained in design vision or design thinking. Years ago I taught Intro to Architecture at the Pratt Manhattan Center in New York. By the third class session we'd go on a walking tour, and early in that tour we'd end up at the corner of East 53rd Street and Park Avenue. At that intersection stand three landmarked structures, Mies van der Rohe's Seagrams' Building, Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, and Charles McKim's Racquet Club. On the fourth corner is 399 Park Ave, a building completed in 1961 for Citibank - or as it was then called - The First National City Bank of New York. This building is on no one's landmark list. Why?

The why? requires learning to use Design Vision and Design Thinking, and also requires that observers step away from "I" statements. What makes three of these buildings great and the fourth a mediocre pile of steel and glass is really not a question of personal preference, it is instead an understanding of humanity and how humans see and understand. There are lots of clues to the failures of 399 Park when it is compared to its neighbors, from window shapes which violate the Golden Mean to an entry that's somewhat unfindable to massing which fails to meet the ground - and pedestrians - with grace, but the untrained observer will not see them - or will not understand what is wrong - without help.

Who helps educators do this? When an educator looks at a classroom, or a corridor, or a library, or a playground, or the school's entry... what do they see? How do they understand what they see?

Libraries - the Learning Commons

Middle School Library gathering space, connectivity everywhere

In the school system in which I work we invest very heavily in libraries. This counters a US national trend towards abandoning libraries and laying off librarians, but we see our school libraries as the center of our transformation from a collection of "teaching places" to a community of "learning spaces."

In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are also changing some officials’ view of librarians: as more classrooms are equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, [New York City Schools' city’s chief academic officer] Mr. Polakow-Suransky noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously might have required a library visit. 

Now, I think we're smarter than Mr. Polakow-Suransky, and we've alway assumed that our libraries are more than a place for students to use the World Book, but we also know that if libraries are to be the Learning Commons at the center of our schools they must be re-thought, re-imagined, and re-designed in ways are far beyond "tinkering." In a century where all the world's libraries are linked to our phones, where information and books are no longer scarce but somewhat overwhelming, and where curation has become a mass participation exercise, the function of libraries as learning spaces requires radical change, and we expect our school librarians to not just change and adapt, but to be the leaders in our school buildings.

HackerSpace in one of our high school libraries
seating choices from bean bags to pub-height bar, technologies, tools

What do we look for? We look for flexible, adaptive, multiple media learning and creation environments. We look for student comfort, student choice, student-centric spaces. We look for students dropping in - all day long, whether elementary or secondary - so we know this is not "just" a scheduled space. We look for flexibility of design and the ability of students to alter that design as they need to - what we call "Student-Crafted Learning Environments."

"Student-Crafted
Learning Environment"

We expect our libraries to be MakerSpaces. Our libraries have legos, music studios, construction areas, one has a Makerbot 2 replicator, which students - quite "casually" - come and use to prototype things they've designed.

Students come with lunch and snacks and drinks, move the furniture, grab technology or bring their own, settle in, and work in contemporary environments.

Our libraries are far more kitchens than supermarkets these days, which makes sense. Our information supermarkets now reside in our hands, our quiet study places now reside in our earbuds and headphones, but our gathering places, our "Learning Commons," the places where we come together, for communion and contagious creativity, those are often what we are missing.

We've done this with money - creating a "Glass Room" quieter space at one high school, buying shelves which roll in many elementary libraries - and we've done it without money - dumping old VHS tapes and magazines and other stored items, and eliminating librarian offices to create quieter spaces, music studios, and maker spaces in others.

We've done it buying new soft seating and we've done it with kids and volunteers padding windowside shelves and turning them into window seats. We've done it with commercial furniture from Bretford and Turnstone and we've done it with stuff from the seasonal clearance piles at Walmart and Target.

A hand-me-down created "quieter space" created from what was,
for ten or more years, storage.

We've cut down or eliminated space-hogging circulation desks and bought boxes of wet wipes to clean up food and drink spills. We've created open computer networks which let kids connect their own devices and we've built "tool cribs" of differing devices for our students to use.

Changing "Teaching Places" into "Learning Spaces" is
primarily about the attitudes we adopt.

The point is that the time for excuses and complaining is over. Whoever you are, wherever you are, outside of say, a KIPP school or maybe the city school districts of New York and Chicago (thanks to mayors Rahm Emanuel and Mike Bloomberg), you have the power to undo your teaching place and create a learning space in its stead. The trick is to begin.

- Ira Socol

The Church Task Believers

I watched single-taskers this morning. Stopped at an intersection in a university town, an ambulance, blaring siren and flashing lights, was trying to get through the clog of traffic, but no one in a group of 12 cars could multitask - they could not take in their surroundings, they could not assess the other traffic, they could not develop a plan, a solution, that would allow the ambulance to move toward the hospital. They were driving: single-tasking in the way too many educational "experts" want students to function.

According to "experts," this is impossible...

Multitasking at a Virginia Beach diner.

I thought of this as I read a blog post claiming to be a "Brilliant Report" a bit later:

"For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

"Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

'“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”' - Annie Murphy Paul

According to Rosen and Paul, there is something "scary" happening here. According to me, there is something "human" and "functional" here.

But then, I was not raised to be a dedicated Calvinist church-goer, or a dedicated "school student." Instead, I was raised to be a "learner."

"effective," "productivity," "on-task,"
attention-means-gaze, are all the inheritances
of our Puritan past

What Rosen and Paul want are churchgoers. Not just any churchgoers, but Calvinist Protestants of the New England Puritan mode. Sit up straight, stare front, all read together, don't you look out the window! This isn't a Catholic churchgoer, surrounded by images and movement, candles and scents, sculptures and varied light, movement and individual action - it is pure American Calvinism, it is behaviour control, compliance training. It is not about individual learning, but the kind of highly-structured group motion development inherent in our imported Prussian Model of education.

Dr. Rosen's problem, Annie Murphy Paul's problem, is that they are, without even knowing it, rejecting student engagement as an educational core.

"During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone," Paul writes. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.”'

The egocentrism drips here. Dr. Rosen believes his mere presence assures that students will want to stare at the bullet points on his PowerPoint. With a lecture style fully honed during the overhead projector and Kodak Carousel era, he assumes that everyone, not just a few eager teacher-pleasers in the front two rows, is paying attention. My guess is that he could have called on random students in the back ten years ago and found similar blank stares. It's an effing PowerPoint, my dear professor, its already in note form, why the hell would I be listening to you?

So here's the research question Rosen and Paul are asking: "Assuming that the best way for students to learn is to do nothing but listen to "me" and read exactly what "I" have assigned, are students listening to my every word and reading everything I have assigned?" Then they rate "learning" according to a student's ability to repeat every word they say. No, its worse, this "research" measures learning according to the metric of "seat time" - are you sitting there being "a good little white boy or girl"?

"...the promise of educational innovation is less about processing power and software code and more about the opportunity to release ourselves from general assumptions regarding how instruction is organized and delivered," Joel Rose wrote in The Atlantic last year.  "It's why our collective charge in K-12 innovation today should go beyond merely designing and producing new tools. Rather, our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do."

So, if your goal is children sitting still and "Reading, writing, listening," as Annie Paul Murphy tweeted to me, then, multitasking "disrupts" learning. But if your vision of learning looks a bit more active, then these technologies do not disrupt, they connect, engage, expand possibilities, make learning possible for those formerly labelled as "disabled."

It's not disruption, it's learning...

The sad fact here is that this is neither a question of technology, nor a question of disruption and attention. It is a question of quality teaching. In 2007 I wrote, in the Grand Rapids Press and on this blog, about the power of teaching with these tools - and of course, it isn't just a "why," but a "how." In classes I teach phones and computers are how we investigate and share information, we're not dependent on Slide Decks and bullet points. We converse on our devices via TodaysMeet and Twitter and Google Docs. We read on our devices. We use Google and Wikipedia and other search tools for discovery. We Skype with experts.

In other words, we use the communication and information tools of this century to learn, rather than bemoaning the loss of an elitist past.

We, in education, need to be better than this. While the medical profession embraces the "MTAT" - the MultiTasking Aptitude Test - because, "Emergency physicians epitomize what it's like to work in a time-pressured, interruption-based environment. Multitasking is necessary to survive in this environment where you are constantly shifting focus and addressing new tasks or problems as they arise," we have writers like Paul quoting, "David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning," who, she says, "takes a firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time."' In other words, according to these "experts" and their "research," the work of everyone in hospital emergency rooms, or in police work, or even in short-order cooking, is impossible... because, of course, their studies prove that.

Let me end by going back to this morning. I have sat in Emergency Vehicles, driving, talking on the radio, communicating with a partner, planning a series of actions on which vast knowledge of both tactics and law must underlie, figuring out a route, knowing if anyone is on the sidewalk if driving there must be an option, and I have watched single-taskers trying to figure out how to get out of the way. I'm sure Dr. Meyer thinks planning out a life-saving strategy and communication and driving fast are all "simple tasks." I'm sure Dr. Rosen thinks I was endangering lives because my brain doesn't work like his. And I'm sure Annie Murphy Paul would think I wasn't attending to what was "important."

Not only do researchers find that multitasking is possible,
they are starting to list the advantages.

But those of us in the real world understand that humans multitask every minute. We are not sharks. We can be in love and eat at the same time. We can read and feel the sun on our skin. We can listen to complex music and still be aware of our surroundings. We can talk on the phone and work on the computer.  I can even type this post while observing a brilliant example of kids proving out a new paradigm of education.

We are multitaskers, or someone has trained us not to be.

- Ira Socol

The system design is not our fault. Its perpetuation is our problem.

I often tell American educators that if we are succeeding with a third to a half of our students, it is only because our educators are trying so hard. The system, after all, was designed and built with the intent to fail 80% of students before 8th grade ended, so we are far exceeding our "design capability."

I've written lots on this... the most accessible versions here as a One, Two, Three, Four, Five part series on the history of our system. It's an ugly story of a system designed to fail most our children, designed to create compliant factory workers and miners, designed to limit the opportunities for the poor to move between socio-economic classes, and designed to ensure an unchallenged power structure. And for 180 years it has done those things with intentionality, whether the hands on the wheels were Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley, or Bill Gates and Salman Khan.

From age-based grades and grade-level-expectations, to textbooks, Carnegie Units, chairs and desks, the teaching wall, and the shape of our classrooms, we were handed a set of horrible paradigms - a virtual war against childhood - and asked to somehow lead our nation into a future...

That's the basic truth, it isn't our fault that our schools are literally built from the ground up to work against us. But, if we are not fighting to change that system every day, from whatever position we hold in education, that is our fault. If we are educators, we begin that profession with a commitment to children, and that is a sacred trust.

The change needed is radical. It is essential that we redefine almost everything about our schools, which is a very difficult task to undertake, but we have a system that is somewhere between 50 and 120 years behind the curve, and that should promote some urgency.

Misunderstanding Cognition

By the time our educational system, whether in the US or the British Empire, was codified and permanized between 1890 and 1910, it was already deeply behind, locked in the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States - the arrival of the railroad, steamboat, telegraph, and mass produced print media - and in the "Second British Empire" in Englland-dominated lands - a place of simply processing the spoils of the colonies. Of course both were already history, as the Boer War had proved to the United Kingdom and the arrival of airplane, cinema, telephone, and phonograph were proving in both environments.

Whether colonial resentments and migration, or the new cognitive authority of the motion picture, the "sit and git," "same for all," step-by-step filtering system of the educational design was already failing these nations, no matter what racist apologists for the past like Woodrow Wilson might say.

We know the failure because of the willingness of all these nations to rush into war with no critical thinking from 1898 to 1914 (including the ease of media manipulation). We know the failure because it remained the "non graduates" - from Henry Ford to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Wright Brothers - who dominated the new economy of the time.

Almost 50 years ago, Polaroid introduces the Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat era.

Notice that photography is no longer about memory, but is instead an
instantaneous social connectivity tool. Kids passed dirty pictures too...

Since 1910 the divide between reality and education has grown exponentially, rushing at breakneck speed over the past fifty years. Schools missed the critical changes even in print literature - from John Dos Passos USA Trilogyin the 1930s to the Beatsin the 1950s to Tom Wolfein the 1960s - and so - contemporary language continues to elude most teachers of the English language. Schools missed the impact of film literature on culture, the impact of visual media in general. Mass media, always minimally and poorly taught, has failed us from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds (really? can't tell news from drama on the radio?) to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Schools missed the revolution in interpersonal communications which was created by the telephone, the automobile, the urbanization of the world, and eventually the contemporary technologies of chat, mobile devices, email, Twitter, et al...

This still horrifying bit of 8mm movie film (not even yet "Super 8") represents a
key moment in the citizen journalism we all know today. 50 years ago in November...

Each of these changes, despite what many in education will tell you, alters cognition because it alters cognitive authority - that which allows someone to believe something. We know how quickly this happens too. During the Spanish American War American filmmakers understood the need for people to see "moving images" so clearly that they faked them. Thirty years earlier a "cyclorama" might have been clear truth, now, something else was essential.

Scholarly material: The Gettysburg Cyclorama seemed
definitive until film appeared.

What is truth now? We were all reminded last week that if truth once came from organizations like NBC News and CNN, that's no longer true at all. So how do our students decide if they can trust us?

If your answer remains, "because I (or the book) told them," it may be time to go, because few will believe you, even if some pretend to for grading purposes. They know that educators lie - they make up silly simplifications because they think kids are stupid. They teach stuff even a casual Google search proves untrue, whether in math or social studies. They make up rules which lack any logic. They divide up subjects and time with no regard to how humans learn. They test in ways which measure nothing important. And thus, in the cognitive authority structure of this century - our students' century - educators, "we," have proven wholly unreliable. And no amalgam of initials after your name or collected diplomas on your wall will change that.

So we need to doubt everything. Question everything. Engage in "Zero-Based Design" thinking, which imagines that we can start from the ground up, instead of inheriting a dysfunctional structure. And we need to act. As an Iowa superintendent said on Monday, "This is urgent, we can't keep doing this to kids."

The system is not our fault, but every day we continue to tolerate it is. We need a sense of urgency. For our kids' sake.

- Ira Socol

All the "good people"

"And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take." - Ta-Nehisi Coates

What are we willing to tolerate in our schools? Which behaviors are we willing to "accept" because otherwise, it gets too hard?

I'm not talking about kids. I'm talking about the adults that we employ. What guides our decisions when we consider teachers and other educators? And what does that choice of guides tell us about how we value children?

I am a huge supporter of American educators... teachers, principals, librarians, counselors, bus drivers, the people in the cafeteria, custodians, everyone. I believe in paying these people well, treating them like the incredibly valuable professionals they are, in tenure, in due process, in unions - all of that. It makes me sick that we live in societies in which stock brokers - who are nothing more than bookies in better suits - get paid more than teachers - who are in charge of our future. It speaks to a level of warped priorities that is hard to fathom, but...

Not everyone belongs in our schools. Not everyone who currently works in our schools should be in our schools. Not everyone who can graduate from a teacher education program is capable of being a teacher, nor is everyone who can write a cute essay and be accepted into Teach for America. These jobs are too difficult, and they are far too important.

We know that certain school paradigms (like KIPP - above) are racist and based on
false assumptions instead of research and knowledge, but too often we allow similar
nonsense to go on down the corridor.

Over the past two months I've listened very carefully to what educators, challenged to change, say. I've listened carefully because (a) that is my job, (b) this is my research question of the moment, and (c) because I am fascinated. And quite often I hear educators who deeply wrestle with how to make schools better for kids, and who wrestle with that every day. But sometimes I hear others. I hear the "yeah, buts..." as I've come to call them.

The "yeah but" response sounds like this, "I know this teacher is a problem, but she's really nice and she's been here a long time." Or this, "I know I should learn that, but its just easier to do what I've always done." Or this, "You know, you're right but we can't make our teachers uncomfortable." Or this, "Well, we're really trying to work on this, and he is trying to change a little."

What the "yeah but" response means is that the educator saying that has chosen to value the adults more highly than the children they work for. It might be themselves - their own comfort, their own laziness, their own lack of professional commitment - or it might be their "adult community" that they value more than kids - workplace harmony, an easier job as an administrator, the desire not to have the really difficult conversations. But whatever, the "yeah but" response indicates that the person giving it has divided the world into first and second class citizens, and then has placed the children in the "second class" position.

"I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people," Coates writes in the Op-Ed piece quoted at the start, and I want to ask the same questions in education. How often is it acceptable for students to say, as I've heard teachers say, "its easier for me if I don't learn that"? How often is it acceptable for students to say, as I've heard a few school librarians say, "its better for me if I have a few hours of quiet time by myself each day"? How often is it that an individual student gets to set the noise level in a classroom, a corridor, a cafeteria? How often do we accept children who, not doing anything near what we think is their best work, choose to continue to do that completely unchallenged?

Simple answer is, "we don't." Which means that if we "tolerate" answers like that from our adults, we have made a choice not to value our kids as what is most important. Often, yes, we are actually "saying" that a school employee's right to be lazy is more important than a child's right to the best education we can offer. Is that a sign we're ready to put up over our schools' entries?

If not, maybe we need to start saying something else...

One thing which must be unacceptable among adults in our schools is an unwillingness to be not just active learners but professionals who adapt their practices based on new learning. We literally know a million times more about the human brain and the universe than we did a generation ago, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone involved in the education of children has not changed what they do and how they do it.

glia cells, ignored a decade ago, now show us remarkable things about learning
and FMRIs have revealed the teenage brain in incredible new light

Ten years ago, for example, most of the cells of the brain - how our brains work - was completely ignored. Five years ago we were only beginning to understand how playing video games not only boosts learning, but boosts "traditional" reading. If you attended college even this year, your understanding of the teenage brain is probably completely wrong, based in outdated, non-evidence-based assumptions which live on in textbooks written based on decade-old knowledge bases. Imagine going to your doctor and having her or him treat you based solely on knowledge and opinion gained in medical school in 1975.

That  "old doctor," the one who might not believe in MRIs and contemporary medications, might be a hell of a nice guy. He might have coached Little League for years, helped his neighbors, been a pillar of his church. He might be helping grandchildren get through college. But still, I don't want him in my hospital, I don't want him treating my family, or anyone else.

Coates builds his argument against "good people" around the racist incident at a New York City delicatessen involving actor Forrest Whitaker, "The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked." Well, I'd ask the same question. If this was your child, would you want this "professional" teaching them? leading them? working in their school?

If your answer is "no," then, you have a responsibility to act, from whatever position you are in. And you have a responsibility to act with just one guiding question, "What is the right thing to do for our kids - all of our kids?" All the other questions? Those are just excuse-makers.

- Ira Socol

Who will bring the fight for children to the here and now?

Perhaps I was born to be a revolutionary. Perhaps.

At least I know I was born to be uncomfortable with the world as it is, and that is where revolutions begin - discomfort, dissatisfaction, perhaps distrust.

It is just past Christmas and the Solstice, Hanukkah and the New Year. It is that moment when we are at the darkest hour that the days begin to lengthen and hope begins to spring forth again. This is why, though Jesus was pretty assuredly born in July, and Hanukkah commemorates religious lunatics who would make the Taliban look reasonable, and the New Year might find itself at any point of our orbital ellipse, we bring our candles to this northern hemisphere moment of darkness and celebrate re-birth and re-commitment.

And so, in January 2013 I look at the world many of us live in, that world of public education. Those places where we say to every child, "come on in, we'll do our best for you." And as I look I wonder what it is that we must do next.

Revolutions are dangerous things. They can surely run way off the rails... see the French Reign of Terror, or the Soviet Union under Stalin, or even, in some ways, Cuba. But revolutions remain necessary, in those just mentioned cases, France's Ancien Régime, the Russian Empire, or the Cuba of dictator Batista that many (including the parents of Florida Senator Marco Rubio) fled, were all nightmarish places of hunger and poverty and vicious assaults on the most basic human rights. It's not like following the status quo in any of those places would have represented a more acceptable outcome.

Even Velvet Revolutions have
their cost. Prague Spring, 1968

So revolutions are dangerous, but revolutions are essential. "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion," Thomas Jefferson said. (later noting, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.")

And revolutions can be "velvet," they need not be violent and highly destructive... though destruction of accepted practice is what separates a true revolution from a rebellion/civil war like the "American Revolution." (The American Revolution simply separated 13 British North American colonies from the nation of Great Britain, in almost every case, government forms, practices (such as voting), economic life, and citizen rights carried over intact.) Velvet or not, revolutions have very high costs, and require participants to take very high risks, which is why they are rare things.

Do we need an educational revolution? I surely believe so, whether it is led by a heroic leader in place like Alexander Dubcek or by a charismatic outsider like Nelson Mandela or Mohandas Ghandi. We can do without the Lenin-types I'd imagine, but I am not sure that another 20 years of children can afford to live with the system we've inherited from Henry Barnard, the Carnegie Corporation, and Benjamin Disraeli, any more than another generation of Chinese could have survived under the abusive chaos and poverty of Chang Kai-shek's Republic of China in 1949.

We need child-centered schools which allow children real choices so that they can learn to make choices. We need schools which embrace holistic, human assessment of where children are and where they need to go. We need schools which allow children and adolescents to be children and adolescents, and universities which embrace exploration and not regurgitation. We need schools which celebrate challenge instead of conformity. We need schools devoted to every child's needs rather than being devoted to systems and adult needs.

And to get there we must take risks, we must challenge what we can, we must subvert when necessary. More than anything, we need passionate commitment to change.

Passionate commitment to jumping off of our comfort zones, whatever those comfort zones are, and however far that jump can carry you as a differing human. Your jump may not be like mine. Mine may not be like someone else's. We jump differently at 23 than we do at 35 than we do at 50 than we do at 70, but we can all still intellectually leap. And so we must.

Passion commitment also means accepting risk, and challenge, and doubt. That is, after all, what we ask of our students every day, and that must be what we ask of ourselves.

So, wherever you are now, this new year is a great moment to leap. And with that in mind, I leave you with the music of revolutionary passion...

- Ira Socol

Enjolras
Do you hear the people sing?  
Singing a song of angry men?  
It is the music of a people  
Who will not be slaves again!  
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start  
When tomorrow comes!
Combeferre  
Will you join in our crusade?  
Who will be strong and stand with me? 
Somewhere beyond the barricade  
Is there a world you long to see?
Courfeyrac  
Then join in the fight  
That will give you the right to be free!!
All  
Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people 
Who will not be slaves again!  
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start  
When tomorrow comes! 
Feuilly  
Will you give all you can give  
So that our banner may advance 
Some will fall and some will live  
Will you stand up and take your chance?  
The blood of the martyrs  
Will water the meadows of France!
All  
Do you hear the people sing?  
Singing a song of angry men? 
It is the music of a people  
Who will not be slaves again! 
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start  
When tomorrow comes

 

I sat within the valley green, I sat me with my true love
My sad heart strove the two between, the old love and the new love
The old for her, the new that made me think on Ireland dearly
While soft the wind blew down the glen and shook the golden barley

'Twas hard the woeful words to frame to break the ties that bound us
But harder still to bear the shame of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen I'll seek at morning early
And join the bold united men, while soft winds shake the barley"

While sad I kissed away her tears, my fond arms round her flinging
The foeman's shot burst on our ears from out the wildwood ringing
A bullet pierced my true love's side in life's young spring so early
And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley

But blood for blood without remorse I've taken at Oulart Hollow
And laid my true love's clay cold corpse where I full soon may follow
As round her grave I wander drear, noon, night and morning early
With breaking heart when e'er I hear the wind that shakes the barley

Stand up, damned of the Earth
Stand up, prisoners of starvation
Reason thunders in its volcano
This is the eruption of the end.
Of the past let us make a clean slate
Enslaved masses, stand up, stand up.
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be all.
This is the final struggle,
Let us group together, and tomorrow 
The Internationale
Will be the human race.

My name is John Riley
Ill have your ear only a while
I left my dear home in Ireland
It was death, starvation or exile
And when I got to America
It was my duty to go
Enter the Army and slog across Texas
To join in the war against Mexico
It was there in the pueblos and hillsides
That I saw the mistake I had made
Part of a conquering army
With the morals of a bayonet blade
So in the midst of these poor, dying Catholics
Screaming children, the burning stench of it all
Myself and two hundred Irishmen
Decided to rise to the call
(Chorus)
From Dublin City to San Diego
We witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the Saint Patrick Battalion
And we fought on the Mexican side
We marched neath the green flag of Saint Patrick
Emblazoned with Erin Go Bragh
Bright with the harp and the shamrock
And Libertad pala Republica
Just fifty years after Wolftone
Five thousand miles away
The Yanks called us a Legion of Strangers
And they can talk as they may
(Chorus)
From Dublin City to San Diego
We witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the Saint Patrick Battalion
And we fought on the Mexican side
We fought them in Matamoros
While their volunteers were raping the nuns
In Monterey and Cerro Gordo
We fought on as Irelands sons
We were the red-headed fighters for freedom
Amidst these brown-skinned women and men
Side by side we fought against tyranny
And I daresay wed do it again
(Chorus)
From Dublin City to San Diego
We witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the Saint Patrick Battalion
And we fought on the Mexican side
We fought them in five major battles
Churobusco was the last
Overwhelmed by the cannons from Boston
We fell after each mortar blast
Most of us died on that hillside
In the service of the Mexican state
So far from our occupied homeland
We were heroes and victims of fate