a brief twitter conversation on our testing culture...

On a Thursday night a mathematics teacher from around Vancouver was looking for sympathy on Twitter...

She said: What do you do when a student skips a math test and the parent thinks YOU are unreasonable expecting them to have been there? #bced #mathed

I looked at this, and thought a few things. I thought about the entire idea of the classroom test. I thought about a teacher picking a fight with both students and parents in the week before Christmas. And I thought about the amazing amount of potential educational time "we" in schools waste on fighting battles over compliance which do absolutely nothing to help kids either learn a subject, a skill, or learn to be successful adults.

from, F in Exams by Richard Benson

So, I jumped in... and away we went...

 

Me: does the student know the maths in question? #bced #mathed

British Columbia Maths Teacher:  the formative assessment says they know some....

Me: then, is the test important? What will it show?

British Columbia Maths Teacher:  it is summative assessment. It will show what they can do.

Me: ok, but can't she do the same thing lots of ways? Is the test format of some special value?

British Columbia Maths Teacher: yes. It is their opportunity to show me what they can do.

Me: ok, I've just never understood either the classroom test or why it would need to happen at any specific moment... I think teachers have a million ways to gather information about where their students are. And should do it continuously

British Columbia Maths Teacher: [to another in the twitter conversation] the policy is a zero [My thought, a “Zero” as a student score is actually at “minus 65,” a cruel and bizarre rating for anyone to receive]. But this entitlement to my time is frustrating. We have two weeks of holiday. I don’t work tomorrow.

British Columbia Maths Teacher: ok you sound like the father. You aren’t helping, sorry.

Me: sorry, its what I tell all the teachers I work with, around the world

British Columbia Maths Teacher: I’m sure they love that message.

Me: we are pushing back against the testing culture at every level, which creates schools which are better for kids … so we say we don't rank either students or teachers by these test scores

British Columbia Maths Teacher: we spend hours creating fair assessment for this purpose. This one took me 4 hours.

Me: tests are never equitable assessments. They create big problems for some kids

British Columbia Maths Teacher: lol now I know you have no idea. Thanks, but you don’t get it.

Me: think of all the time and energy you wasted, making the test, giving it, now fighting about it. You could have been teaching

British Columbia Maths Teacher: have a great evening. You are right, my time is important. 

from, F in Exams by Richard Benson

Then, she blocked me

I did suggest: good night, sorry you're not open to doubting your practice. Maybe some day

Perhaps I was harsh, she went onto Twitter about this not to look for a solution, not for professional development purposes, but simply to whine and find people who would tell her she was right. I didn't do that, and neither did some others, and she got frustrated and angry. That's ok. That, perhaps, is the exact same reaction she is getting from at least one of her students - as this teacher blocked me to avoid an uncomfortable conversation about her skills, so this student might have skipped this "summative assessment" for the same reasons.

But, I do ask teachers all the time, "why?" Why is this form of assessment important? Why is this assignment, project, book, test, chair, schedule, good for this student, or what this student needs? And I also ask, "is this worth the time you are investing in it?" How much of your day do you want to devote to law enforcement, or conflict, or teaching a particular form of etiquette? Are their better ways for you, and your students, to use your time?

And I often think about something an Albemarle County (Virginia) middle school teacher said to me one night, as we left a bar during a conference in Williamsburg: "I don't know how you can do this job," he said, "unless you have angst every day about the job you are doing?"

Anyway, that abusive "testing culture" we complain about in the United States, in Britain, in Canada, in Australia, in Irish secondary schools... does it really start with government bureaucrats like Arne Duncan and Michael Gove or with corporate thieves like Pearson? Or does it start with the practices we too often allow to exist in our classrooms?

- Ira Socol

Appreciating a certain teacher

I had a pretty miserable time in "K-12" education. Hell, I've had a pretty miserable time in all my time as a "student." It's not that I'm not good at learning. I love learning. I think most of us do, but "school" is not traditionally about learning, but rather about arbitrary rules and arbitrary rankings - and I do not like either.

Yet, within a range of horrors that "school" has been for me, there are amazing bright spots... and those bright spots are almost all related to great teachers. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Janowitz, who let me show what I could do with music and architecture and made school a little bit safe. A sixth grade teacher, Martin McNeil, who understood an 11 - 12-year-old boy's needs for certain forms of space. Alan Shapiro, who I spent four years with (formally) as teacher, mentor, advisor, friend, and who showed me what education could be. Joe Kuszai, at Michigan State University, who gave me space as an artist to grow and learn and even lead. Antonio Diaz, police sergeant and lawyer in the New York City Police Academy who focused on what I could do, not on what I could not. Y.S. Lee at Pratt Institute, a master teacher who understand the purpose of education. Jonathan White and Kathy Bailey, life changing educators in Criminal Justice at Grand Valley State University, and Alexandra Gottardo and Elizabeth Schaughency, not just great teachers and colleagues, but the "special educators" who truly transformed my life.

below: Alan Shapiro on education, unionization, life...

I can bring myself all the way to the present and Punya Mishra, Lynn Fendler, and Susan Peters at MSU's College of Education.

And I sincerely thank everyone of these brilliant people... but, and in part inspired by Charles Blow, as "Teacher Appreciation Week" begins - and as people like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan begin their faux statements after years of teacher bashing - I want to speak about one teacher in particular.

Her name is Ruth Socol, and she's my mom.

I can remember when she began teaching - I can remember when she graduated from Hunter College - probably mostly focused on adding a touch of income stability to the family. She began teaching in a pre-union time, earned almost nothing and had any chance at free time taken up supervising playgrounds and cafeterias. I remember her up till all hours of the night at this little desk which sat by the front door working on lessons, working on grading. I remember her taking all sorts of summer jobs to help make ends meet.

But that's not what I want to write about.

Not her teacher pic... (obviously)... but my Ma as a young bride was
"movie star" beautiful... and this is an incredible photograph

I want to write about the fighter. My mom never accepted the status quo. She sure could have done all her work and gone home. There sure was plenty to do at home, and honestly, for the time, the schools she taught in were pretty good. But she wasn't satisfied, at any level.

She fought really hard for unionization and the AFT - few elementary teachers pushed very hard for this, it was mostly a secondary thing - but she battled for it. It not only meant decent pay, it meant having a real voice. And when it came down to a big strike over teacher power in the schools - as much as it hurt her to do so - she was part of a small picket line outside of a huge elementary school.

My mom taught third grade, which
featured Dick and Jane in Streets and Roads
when she began

But even more critically, she fought for kids, every day. She pushed for "open classrooms," literally knocking down walls between rooms in order to build a multiage space with no desks, and almost no chairs, where kids could move and get comfortable and progress at their own rate. She pushed her administrators on this, moving them forward, embracing a newly diverse student body and making it work. She spent summers helping to create new - and multimedia - learning materials, leading the push to kick "Dick and Jane" out of the schools. Leading the push to bring manipulatives into maths. (I clearly remember a few summers, around age ten, when I had piles of Cuisinaire Rods to play with...)

She visited her students' homes. She talked to them in the supermarket. She individualized her lessons and fought against homework. And she observed and observed and observed.

"If I could do one thing," she told me when I was maybe 16, "it would be to never push any kid to read before third grade. Most aren't ready for it, and every year my room is filled with eight-year-olds who hate reading and never want to see a book again."

She was among the earliest teachers I knew to toss classroom furniture and replace those desks and chairs with carpet and pillows because, as she said, "kids hate those chairs." Now, her students were no different than any other students, and what she was seeing was no different than what anyone else was seeing, but she simply wouldn't accept what she knew didn't work.

She fought and she worked and she fought for everything that was right for kids, for her community. And she made a real difference. Hardly a month goes by in which I don't get a message in Facebook from one of her ex-students. "Am I her son?" "How is she?" "Please tell her that she changed my life." All this about a woman kids met at age eight.

Anyway, I am her son, and I am the continuation of her life work. She is doing great, she's healthy and active and living well. And thank you, because she changed the lives of many, in really important ways, as so many great teachers do.

From childhood, from my mom, I learned that there is no profession more important to society than teaching. And for all these years, I've wished our culture recognized that.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to my Ma, to every teacher. And Happy Mother's Day too.

- Ira Socol

Twitter as [Teacher] Liberation Technology

based on my recent presentation at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) 2009 Midwest Conference at Kent State University...

If, as Foucault says, power is “neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and that it only exists in action" (Kelly 1994), then the powerlessness of many teachers in relation to their own professional development may be seen as a consequence of inaction – or more specifically – of the lack of a conceptual space which allows them freedom to act.

Foucault saw that the important thing to watch were the moves people make in what I call the "transaction space" between them (with all due thanks to Fendler 2010 for getting me to see this). But I think Gramsci helps me by letting me see the forces which "shape" that space - creating the rules of the game.

Teachers, throughout the world, work in fairly to completely isolated circumstances. Distance between schools and between schools and teacher-training universities, the required time to connect with other teachers or mentors, the issue of getting needed support/scaffolding ‘as needed,’ all create major impediments to ongoing and effective teacher training. And these problems create issues of teacher persistence, retention, and improvement throughout developing nations (Leach, Ahmed, Makalima, and Power 2005), and, without a doubt, in many developed nations as well.

The isolated teacher, locked in his/her classroom, limited to peer interaction during ever briefer lunch periods in even the largest schools (limited by lack of other teachers in smaller schools), finds themselves unable to find support for their professional development. The structure of their time, and the structure of their culture and national education system, limits the information flow - and thus the confidence experience - needed to challenge and doubt the apparent rules.

Information and Communication

Across all of our societies systems of information and communication can either be coercive or liberating. In education, and in teacher education, the systems used have tended toward the coercive: taught degrees with grades based in specific forms for content and delivery; discourse controlled by class-time and semester time schedules as well as by instructor and peer pressure; an emphasis in teacher preparation on classroom management strategies; administratively designed on-going professional development often based in political narratives; nationally-determined standards distributed as directives. All of these structures coerce certain behaviors from teachers and limit their opportunities to control the pedagogy within their own classrooms.

Since I joined Twitter in 2007 I have been participating in and observing a global network of teachers on the “real time” social networking system Twitter. Twitter is referred to as “real time” because “Tweets” appear in a continuous timed stream, and it is obviously a “social networking” system in that it tends to bring together affinity groups on-line. But unlike systems such as Facebook it does not require mutual “friending” to establish contact. Unless a user locks down his or her account, anyone can follow what that user is saying. Unlike professional social sites like Linked-In, no “credentials” need be established. But Twitter does allow groups to form – both permanently through mutual “follows” and temporarily through “hash tags” which connect a specific conversation. There is clearly a powerful attraction system here, as those who stick with Twitter long enough to discover their affinity groups are drawn into an ever widening orbit of global contact.

What I have watched - in action - is teachers from many nations now given the ability to form their own liberated learning network, sharing resources, ideas, frustrations, problems, research, even lesson plans without official filters, without limits constructed by others. And thus what I have watched is teachers from around the world finding that they are able to change the rules, to make different "plays," within the transaction space which defines their teaching practice.

Meeting, observing, even psychologically supported by this new affinity group, they have broken free from a thousand imagined and understood constraints, and are now able to utilize their own power.

Gramsci, Foucault, and Power Theory

In Gramscian terms, the power of SMS-length social networking is allowing strengthened bonds in the resistance to the status quo, it is allowing power within the structure of education to be utilized and focused in new ways. I am building here on the research in teacher support in sub-Saharan Africa produced by the DEEP Project at the Open University (UK), and a long conversation with the OU's Tom Power in the dining hall at Trinity College at CAL'07. There project gave teachers social networking tools (through SMS) and saw dramatic improvements in teachers' self-perceptions -and in their persistence and retention, even in completely isolated environments such as Western Cape Province. Now, an even free-er form of social networking, Twitter, with its minimal entry requirements and phone-based capabilities, is offering teachers a path to individual power through global organizing which provides not just knowledge but emotional and tactical support in the pursuit of effective educational change (Gramsci 1971, Shirky 2008, Open University 2005).

Twitter as (Teacher) Liberation Technology

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

Foucault, in Chapter 2 of The Order of Things, talked about the powerful differences in similarities. "Convenience" - the proximity similarity, is often what binds teachers together. They share a workplace or an employer. Of course, if all in a group share the same constraints on action, those constraints tend to become invisible - they come "naturalized." But another form of Foucauldian similarity is "emulation." In emulation the similarity builds because we recognize a reflection. On Twitter, I will argue, we are freed from convenience similarity, and free to search for reflections which appear - in some way - familiar. We are free to find emulations. Teachers, in this case, with similar frustrations with the game as it is played. And that leads us to the possibility of Foucault's other two similarities: Analogy, our ability to recognize similar functions even if the form differs (a steering wheel, a horse's reins), and sympathy, the connection based on how we are affected by actions.

These shifts bring us back to Gramsci. Gramsci was not a traditional Marxist who sees power as one-directional and history as inevitable. Gramsci understood that power exists, and we either exercise it or not. In Peter Høeg's novel of inclusive education Borderliners one character describes a fantasy of potential power made real. He imagines a whole classroom of primary pupils working the tiny blades out of their pencil sharpeners and ganging up to kill the teacher through a thousand small cuts. Gruesome, yes, but a perfect demonstration of the powers which typically lie dormant in schools.

As I have watched Twitter (you can see a few representative Tweets in the PowerPoint above), I have watched this shift from potential to exercised power as teachers connect and free themselves from the "rules of the game" in their personal educational transaction spaces. With newly available observations of actions which have not been experienced before, which have bypassed the systems in which they operate, they are liberated to see things in new ways, to understand things in broader ways, and, essentially, to act in ways previously unforeseen.

It is powerful stuff. And it may indeed portend some radical changes in how education occurs, and how it is controlled.

- Ira Socol

Fendler, L. (2010) Michel Foucault. Continuum.

Foucault, M. (1994). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.

Kelly, M. (ed) (1994). Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault / Habermas Debate (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). MIT Press.

Leach, J., Ahmed, A., Makalima, S., and Power, T. (2005). DEEP Impact: An Investigation of the Use of Information and Communication Technologies for Teacher Education in the Global South. Open University.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin.

Changing Education?

"It didn't take me very long after I started teaching to become aware (nobody at [Teachers College] ever helped me to become aware) that there were plenty of students who could learn, but not necessarily what I wanted them to learn and how I wanted them to learn it, that there were cultural differences that I didn't understand but needed to and then figure out what to do with those new understandings--not a simple matter in the 19th century schoolroom."

I was really, really lucky as a student. I had one of those "best five teachers in the country" step into my life in adolescence. And though that didn't make things easy - it is many, many years later and I still hate school and know that, for me as for probably a large majority of all students, it is the wrong way to try to study things - he did give me the space and time to start to figure out what my learning process was, and what kind of environments supported that process.

I think of him as a life-saver in many ways. Without him there would probably have never even been a high school diploma, and that would have limited many possibilities.

So when he recently emailed me the statement above, I did a lot of thinking about it. And I reflected on the ways we still discuss education, and why we cannot ever seem to come up with a structure for education in the United States which works for more than one third of the students.

Then I read this joke from Barry Bachenheimer, commenting on Karen Janowski's blog:

A man is walking his dog and encounters a friend. He tells his friend that he taught his dog to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". The friend is incredulous and asks the dog to sing. "Come on Fido, sing." The dog is silent. The friend says again "Come on Fido, let's hear Twinkle Twinkle..." The dog remains silent.

The friend then says "I thought you said you taught your dog to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"?"

The man says "I did. He just didn't learn it."

Here's the thing - there are lots of metaphors for the way education is perceived in the US, and they are all pretty accurate. 1. Education follows the "Industrial Model," and has since the late 19th Century and (at least) the Committee of Ten report. Education is roughly akin to a stamping plant. Raw material enters at kindergarten, perceived as essentially all the same. Repeated applications of pressure steadily transform this raw material into a value-added product which can be used in an industrial economy. If one piece of raw material fails to properly transform it is because it is inherently flawed (disabled or "bad") and it is plucked from the assembly line and dumped in the reject bin. 2. Education follows the "Missionary Model," and has at least since the Puritans began "public" schooling around Massachusetts Bay in the 17th Century. "The Church" (Society) sends out "missionaries" (teachers) to convert the "heathens" (children) into good, solid, obedient, Christian, white people who will work consistently and not trouble society. If the conversion fails to take it is because the heathen (child) was born on the wrong side of John Calvin's pre-destination divide. In this case "separation from the body of the church" is the best solution. 3. Education is "Political Indoctrination," not really any different in the US than it might be in Cuba or was in the old Soviet Union. The purpose of education is the creation of loyal, compliant citizens who will fill the roles in society which must be filled. Learning to follow instructions and a schedule, learning to pledge allegiance and respect authority, learning to sit down and shut up are not some "hidden curriculum," this is the curriculum. If a student fails to comfortably assume these compliant qualities it is because they are criminals, and must be treated as such.

And with each of these models - all of which we can directly see represented in national policies such as No Child Left Behind and in the research theories embraced by the American Educational Research Association - comes the idea of education as a "delivery system." Education - curriculum - will be "delivered" to students. If there is a failure in the delivery, it is the failure of the recipient first and foremost - they were not home for the delivery, or were not ready for it, or were unprepared to bring it into their house. Or, to a lesser extent, it might be a failure of the delivery "person." They didn't ring the doorbell enough, or did not knock loudly enough, or they were too slow doing other things and didn't have enough time for their whole route. Either way, of course, no one actually questions what is being delivered, or to whom. The only thing at issue is the process.

On Alice Mercer's blog she is asking "What do they need?" And that is the unasked question. Because Americans think lots of people are the "customer" in the educational process - the society, the business community, the economy itself, maybe even the parents - but they almost always fail to identify the actual customer: the student.

And it is only by identifying the student as the customer that education can be changed. What does the student need? How can what the student needs be offered, most effectively, to that student? When does the student need what they need? It is those questions which will shift the problem from the student, and to a significant extent, the teacher, and put it where it belongs, on the very system, on the very conception of education as we know it. After all, empowered students and empowered teachers could work wonderfully together if they had both the freedom and the resources they needed to work together effectively as collaborators. That relationship would not demean the teacher at all - it makes the teacher the professional expert of incalculable value. And it would not demean the student - who becomes an active participant in learning and actively responsible for learning.

To go back to the top, my old teacher said, "there were plenty of students who could learn, but not necessarily what I wanted them to learn and how I wanted them to learn it." That teacher decided that the system was at fault, not the student. And he worked tirelessly to create an alternative to that system - which he eventually did. An alternative that, as I said, I still consider a "life-saver." But all around us the blame when students can't or do not want to learn what we want them to, as we want them to, when we want them to, falls on the students, and on the teachers caught in the middle.

So change who you think the customer is, and you may get the change you need.

- Ira Socol

Alan Shapiro (that "one of the five best teachers") on Education:
History: The Disenchanting Instrument of Recall
The Plagiarism Perplex
Teaching and Critical Thinking
The Essential Skill of Crap-Detecting
Teaching on Controversial Issues
Thinking Critically About Internet Resources
How to Stop Cheaters

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Culture and comprehension

Americans report sport scores in the wrong way. If a person from almost any other nation looks at the score of an American game in progress they will assume that the visiting team is the home team and will be wrong in their assumptions regarding the stadium and city they are seeing. I have seen this create difficulties and misconceptions. It's a tiny thing but it begins to explain the enormous problems faced by educators who refuse to embrace the idea of differentiated instruction and instruction based in, or at least accepting of, the culture of the individual learner.

Ever watch the faces of confused learners - or a confused audience? Ever notice that, at first, all of their cognitive effort is being expended on jamming that square peg into that round hole? Maybe you are more familiar with what happens next - they give up, seek distraction, or check out.

A few months ago I threw a statement out to a list-serve of international students during a debate on precision and language in academic discourse. I had been arguing for writing which might best be understood by multiple audiences, and others had been arguing for the perfect precision of subject-specific and audience-specific academic language. So I said, "That lad's got the sliotar just exploding off the hurley."

I said that this statement was absolutely precise. Just about anyone in Ireland - or many New York neighborhoods - would understand immediately, and that the precision "was important," that a sliotar is not a baseball or a lacrosse ball and a hurley is not a tennis racquet or a lacrosse stick. But, I wondered, if I had a room of students, half well versed in Gaelic games and half not, that if it would not be a good idea to make the information reasonably available to both groups, and maybe to the subset of students who know nothing of sports at all.

Because, if we don't do that, some students become unfairly privileged, some will waste much of the cognitive effort we want them to use on "the learning" simply trying to handle our language, and others will give up.

How technology can help

So what if - almost effortlessly - you could solve this? What if fans could choose to see their football scores either on USA Today - home teams listed last (the American tradition that comes from baseball's structure of innings) - or on Guardian.com - home teams listed first? What if any student in the sliotar discussion could instantly type sliotar into Wikipedia and link to "Hurling" and quickly access enough information to understand my sentance? What if a student could even hear "sliotar" being pronounced during the radio broadcast of a match? What if students trying to figure this out could dig through their choice of information sources, such as the GAA site, or a YouTube glimpse of the sport?



Or what if students, faced with the question of "what is normal?" had a quick chance to look at global newspaper websites to determine whether most people followed the "home team first" or "home team last" principle?

Cognitive load, and engagement

The role of the technologies - as used above - is twofold. First, it becomes a seamless accommodation, allowing learners with "lesser" levels of access to the curriculum to rapidly "catch up." Don't know those Hurling terms? Not sure which team is home? You can, if you are brave enough, stop the class and ask, but with contemporary technologies you can find it out yourself, and you can make those connections in the way that best serves your own needs. Second, it offers personal engagement, allowing the student to interact with the information in a personally-directed way as the group interaction runs in parallel.

This not some distraction via multi-tasking. This is human learning. It can only be seen as a distraction if you perceive education as a one-way transmission system. It can only be understood as "multi-tasking" (in some bad way) if you think that, while driving, one should only be looking continually straight ahead out through the windshield. (Of course we all know teachers and drivers who do believe these things.)

If, on the other hand, you understand that learning is something which occurs individually, and that it happens best when new data can be linked effectively with the learner's own brain, and if you understand (or admit) that outside of school the human brain handles a flood of different inputs on a continuous basis (we can be both cold and hungry, we can know both that we are walking toward home and that the billboard up ahead has changed, we can understand both that it is about to rain and consider the range of places of shelter up ahead which we can run to and still be concerned with finding the right present for that girl's birthday), you will immediately see the advantages of using technology to expand how students interact with incoming information.

Universalizing

This is not about "disability," at least not if you define "disability" as narrowly as schools define "learning." "Disability" in school terms is a line in the sand which separates the "normal" from the "pathological."

Eyeglasses are fine in any classroom, and books are rarely set in 4 point type, because up to a certain point schools understand that not everyone sees perfectly. But if you are one step out of that "normal" range then schools call you "disabled" and getting help gets much harder. You need not be able to 'speedread' in school, but below a certain rate and you are off to the 'resource room.' You need not be from a wealthy family, but if your parents have not given you the proper white, middle-class social skills, you will be unwelcome in most classrooms.

But I can disable anyone, anytime. I can talk about things which they have no background knowledge of, and act as if they should know. I can put them in a place where they do not understand the language. I can schedule class on the 20th floor and turn off the elevator. I can whisper rather than speak in a normal voice. I could apply British spelling rules (and grade spelling) with American students or apply American spelling rules (and grade spelling) with British students. I could offer a required course only from 2:00 am to 3:30 am, or I could require all students to stand up through the whole class, or class could be held out on the street in a neighborhood that might make every middle class student feel completely uncomfortable. I could even, socratically, refuse to allow books or written notes and demand memory only.

Does that sound ridiculous to you? Maybe, but none of those are any more ridiculous than the typical rules of the classroom feel to any of us who are "different" in dozens of different ways. Your rules mess with our cognitive processes by forcing us to waste energy catching up physically, or culturally, or in terms of communications systems.

Let's go back to the start. Americans report sports scores in a reverse format from the rest of the world. We can either stress out all American sports fans by forcing them to change (or we could, I suppose, force everyone else to change under threat of Bush invasion or Clintonian "obliteration"), or we can explain the difference and allow each group to see these scores their own way via flexible technology. We can expect every student to understand what we are talking about as if they were clones of the teacher, or we can stop and condescendingly explain every thing in our own way (or spoon feed it if we think the student is disabled), or we can use and teach the technologies of differentiated instruction in ways which build engagement and independence.

- Ira Socol

great blog comment of the week: On Inside Higher Ed - On Texts, Tech and Teens: "Come to think of it, what is so wrong with emoticons in writing? In a way, they are simply invented punctuation marks. In another way, they are visual additions to writing. Writing (in the Western world)has had many visual additions through the ages, such as ornate capitals in medieval manuscripts, modern typefaces (which convey meaning!) and poems that take a certain shape. I don’t use them because I think they are hokey, but maybe that’s because my vocabulary of emoticons is limited." - Grocheio, Asst VP Planning and Institutional Effectiveness at Shorter College. What a great statement! Are emoticons more or less annoying than e.e. cummings lack of upper case letters? I think of Robert Ferlinghetti's poem Fortune (actually "7" from A Coney Island of the Mind) - one of the first modern American poems I discovered, and think of how the arrangement of words on the page added meaning beyond the words alone. Aren't emoticons the same thing?

great blog post of the day: Technoshock of the Digital Immigrant at Paragraph City. I think it's a wonderful parallel tale of what I have told above - just more coherently written.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Cognitive Change

"Here’s what I think: learning styles may exist (although the studies that show that they do are generally specious), but they’re largely useless in determining how to teach specific material well. You teach according to the material, not according to theoretical learning styles." - "Michael" commenting at Paragraph City.

"Michael" is a university professor who is very angry with me, who feels "sorry for me," because, well, I'm struggling with his reasons. He says that I "create totalizing narratives in which you are the hero and everyone who disagrees with you, even slightly, is the villain," and he thinks that I fail to show the proper deference to distinguished scholars and faculty. Perhaps he also thinks that I am asking him to change his way of doing things - a way that he likely feels is 'effective teaching.' Perhaps he also thinks that I am accusing him of not really upholding a democratic vision of education.

As I said, it is hard to tell. He is an anonymous commenter. But who he is does not matter, what he is saying - a not unfamiliar sentiment among those who call themselves 'teachers' - does matter. It matters a great deal.

“…effective education is always jeopardy either in the culture at large or with constituencies more dedicated to maintaining a status quo than to fostering flexibility.” – Jerome Bruner in The Culture of Education.

Last night I listened to a podcast of an interview with Harvard's Chris Dede, who studies technology and cognition and who has extensively investigated the differences in cognition between the neo-millennials (people brought up learning with online and other digital tools) and their teachers, and I thought of "Michael"'s assertion about teaching: "You teach according to the material, not according to theoretical learning styles."

Think about this. Really consider it for a moment. According to "Michael" it is only the content which determines pedagogy. You would teach the Romantic Poets in the exact same way no matter who was in your classroom. You would teach Chemistry in the exact same way no matter who was in your classroom. You would teach reading in the exact same way no matter who was in your classroom.

Sounds ridiculous? Yes, but... In schools all across the United States standardized curricula make "Michael"'s very assumption. Michael Bloomberg, the "Education Mayor" of New York City firmly believes in this philosophy. So do many, many reading researchers I have read, all of whom wish to sell a single system that will be applied to all children.

Students, and their learning styles, learning differences, cultural differences must be bent to the norms of the teacher and the school. Schools and teachers need not bend to the differences of their students. Bending that way is 'indulgent" to "lazy, whining" students overflowing with a sense of "entitlement." (all terms from comments on Inside Higher Ed, see post below)

So how is that working for us? What's the end-result of assuming that all of our students learn the same way? that the delivery should be determined by the content, not the learner?

Well, in the US barely more than a third of its students can ever achieve "proficiency" in anything. The US high school drop out rate may actually be close to 50%. US college completion rates are brutally low. And perhaps all those failures explain why this "great democracy" now "has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners." (The New York Times, 23 April 2008). Maybe, just maybe, teachers like "Michael" are leaving a few too many students behind.

Last fall I wrote a paper on cognition and technology after noticing that so many of the texts on the topic seemed to avoid the question of culture. Here's part of what I said:

"In the field of education, and particularly U.S. education, cognition is treated as a science which transcends the impact of culture on the human brain. ... In this view this science seems to adhere closely to the generalized attitude in education that cultural dynamics are less important than other influences on learning – that a classroom can be essentially the same type of architectural construct no matter what continent – that educators may be trained in the United States for service in Kenya, Trinidad, or Malaysia – that a student in a French-speaking neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York should be following the same general curricular schedule as a student in the monoculture of Zeeland, Michigan, or a student in the wealthy walled communities of Boca Raton, Florida.

"In the fields of anthropology and psychology there is a differing stream of thought. "People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of these," Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama wrote in 1991. "These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation."1

"What might this all mean for cognition in education? How do we look at the ways these different "construals" control what occurs in the classroom? At how they impact what occurs in every formalized learning environment? Or, indeed, how they effect what different parts of increasingly diverse cultures "know"? This is vital not simply because of racial, ethnic, religious, and lingual diversity, but because in periods of rapid change – such as this moment in time, different generations can become separate cultures, seeing the world in such significantly different ways that the very acts of cognition may no longer be mutually understandable. In schools, where one generation is "educated" by another, a communications gap of this sort can make almost everything impossible."2

It is this gap which I see in schools and universities today. Teachers like "Michael" are operating under one cognitive framework, and they are teaching to those students who are either trained in that framework through parental training or those who may be particularly gifted in complex code-shifting, but they are not teaching that mass of neo-millennials whose cognitive processes have been more clearly shaped by the emerging culture. And, of course, they are not teaching to that mass of students whose differing cultures or genetics might also mean that the cognitive process works differently.

The kind of straight-line thinking basic to Anglo-American education assumptions - that "undistracted," "single-focus," "book-based," "sit in the room," style is one way of learning. But, as I have said in my posts below, it is an educational style dependent on the proper Protestant training of young children, on certain attention capabilities, on certain literacy and listening capabilities, which are present in fewer and fewer students as the population changes and as technology allows a return to a more natural information flow - learning as a less linear, less structured, more random, and more community-based activity than it has been in "the book era," the past four hundred years.

The advantage of accepting that different students learn in different ways, that the teacher must accommodate the student and not the reverse, and that the student and not the content should be starting point for pedagogy, is the chance to see if US education (or British education to a somewhat lesser degree) can reach beyond the one-third success rate. Can reach out to students who are different culturally, genetically, attitudinally, and generationally from those who run the schools and the classrooms.

Perhaps my requests for this change are a "totalizing narrative" which casts educators such as "Michael" as villains unfairly. But at some point I think all those in education must stop and look at the impact of their own choices on our society.

- Ira Socol

1 Markus, H.R. and Kitayama, S. Culture and the Self. Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation Psychological Review. American Psychological Association. 1991, Vol. 98, No. 2, p.224
2 Socol, I. Irreconcilable Authority: Cognitive Theory, Culture, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century Classroom. Unpublished (as yet) Michigan State University paper. 2007.

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