Renato Ganoza/Flickr

In this era of global competition, test scores are used as the primary benchmark to call out which countries will produce “successful” students. Knowing that American students are competing against a global pool of the best and brightest has led education leaders to focus more on how they score on international tests compared to students from other countries.

But high test scores don’t provide a complete picture of students’ success, according to Yong Zhao, world-renown author, scholar, and professor of education at University of Oregon.

“Countries that score highly, have students with lower confidence,” Zhao said in his keynote address to educators gathered online for the 2013 Leadership Summit.

That seems counter-intuitive, and Zhao isn’t claiming a causal connection — he questions whether focusing on test scores might inadvertently lower confidence. Zhao has analyzed data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and discovered a negative correlation between high math scores and confidence.

Similarly, in his analysis of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test that analyzes how countries score in reading, math and science, Zhao found a negative correlation between attitude and attainment. In other words, the countries with lower scores had students who reported higher interest in the subjects. Zhao analyzed media stories from high scoring countries like Korea and Japan, where students don’t show enough confidence or enthusiasm for subjects in which they excel.

He found the same results when he looked at students’ belief in their entrepreneurial capacity, their ability to start businesses or be self-starters. “Everybody is trying to perfect this system and make a good bet about the knowledge and skills that our children might need,” he said. “All of this says that the measures we use to measure education outcomes, to view them as the best education systems in terms of test scores, do not result in the same kinds of things we might value otherwise — entrepreneurial capabilities, confidence, enjoyment.”

TESTING FOR THE WRONG QUALITIES

Zhao’s findings have led him to question the value of the tests altogether. If the stated goal is to get kids ready for careers, and careers demand confidence, creativity, and an entrepreneurial attitude, then why focus on test scores that seem to produce the opposite effect?

“A lot of times teachers have been asked to improve our schools, to make our schools more effective, but the question I’m raising is, effective at what?” Zhao said. “Some reading programs could improve your students’ reading scores, but cause your students to hate education.” He’s concerned that national initiatives like the Common Core State Standards could have unintended consequences.

In Zhao’s view, most education systems start out by defining the outcomes. They make a bet about which skills will be important and promise that if students master those skills, they will succeed. Zhao sees this as a flawed approach because it forces everyone into a homogenous group, a bit like making sausage out of all different kinds of meat. Defining outcomes allows systems to measure results, but it stamps out individuality.

Countries that score well on international exams, like Korea, have clearly defined outcomes, narrow curricula, and dictatorial systems with clear ranking and sorting systems. Students know exactly how they stack up in that system.

“Everybody is reminded everyday that they have to master the skills,” Zhao said. “But in the process you have people who are either kicked out of the system or put down into a different school and they will lose confidence.”  By valuing what’s prescribed and assessed, the system creates a uniform group with little confidence in the individual’s unique contributions.

Zhao pointed to the tremendous amount of local control in the U.S. educational system as both its savior and a contributing factor to its lower test scores. It allows for different types of schools and for students to demonstrate that they can be good at different things. There are arts schools, engineering schools and schools focused on bi-lingual education. That kind of choice allows students the chance to find what they are good at. The U.S. system also gives learners many second chances to keep learning and find their strengths.

[RELATED READING: Some Ask: What's the Value of Common Core State Standards?]

“The new education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content,” Zhao said. “We start with individual differences; we start with their cultural strengths.” Beginning with the individual and building upwards from there allows each person to become uniquely great at something. And when students are passionate about anything, they can then be creative and entrepreneurial. For Zhao, the new model has to be about creating a new middle class based on creativity.

To do that, he suggests giving students more autonomy over their learning and emphasizing the importance of making authentic products that solve problems. He also emphasizes a global learning community that can collaborate to fill the gaps that each country, school or teacher experiences.

ZHAO’S INITIATIVES

Zhao is actively trying to create the learning experiences he has written and lectured about. He’s started an online education community called ObaWorld, which costs $1 per student per year and is a closed, private site. It’s a cloud-based learning platform, like Moodle, and includes similar features like the ability to make and evaluate portfolios. But Zhao is most excited that he’s recruiting students and teachers from all over the world to participate. So a teacher can create a tool or course and put it on ObaWorld to help an educator on the other side of the country.

His other big push is to create more entrepreneurial school leaders through the Global Education Leadership Master’s program, which is based online and accredited through University of Oregon. Students will have to create a product that will improve education and will be encouraged to think about schools as entrepreneurial global enterprises.

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Education reformers have been calling for a different type of education, one that nurtures creative and innovative thinkers. But for many, that future is hard to see and even harder to influence.

Science fiction writers and blockbuster movies have been predicting a world run by robots for decades, and for most of us, the fantasy has stayed in the realm of fiction. But artificial intelligence has made rapid progress and robots are becoming more a part of everyday life than many people realize. Those who study robots and their impact on life foresee a day not too far off when many jobs now held by people will be automated.

“If you can detect a pattern, you can automate it,” said Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign and a visiting practitioner at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who spoke at the recent Learning and the Brain Conference. Fadel sees signs that robots are already becoming a part of everyday life. Google has a self-driving car. Japan recently put on a concert, attended by thousands of people, featuring a hologram popstar with a synthesized voice. Virtual models are gradually being put to work displaying the newest styles, and Watson the supercomputer whooped-on the best Jeopardy players. Signs of robotic intelligence are everywhere and educators need to be preparing students to enter a dramatically different world, Fadel said.

As artificial intelligence improves and slowly takes over aspects of daily life, the only way for people to continue to be useful is to “up-skill” — and that takes creativity. “Incremental creativity is just improving on something, but radical creativity is thinking something up,” Fadel said. He believes that, in time, computers will be capable of incremental creativity, slowly improving a process and building on its success. What they will never be able to do is generate a radically new idea.

“We’re being pushed upwards in abstraction, in some senses,” Fadel said. Recognizing how sophisticated computers already are, and how much better the algorithms are getting will be important as the education system evolves. Implicit in Fadel’s stark view of how artificial intelligence fits into human kind’s future is a question about the value of education. Why teach content when everything is searchable? Why teach specific skills when computers will one day be able to do that work, he asks.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

Education has to focus on learning how to learn – metacognition. School will still be important, but not to impart what happened during the Revolutionary War or to teach the quadratic formula. School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating.

In the future, computers and humans will be working together to create the next big invention and when that happens, people can distinguish themselves by controlling the process and the strategy. Humans will define the goals and will think creatively about solutions.

But to get to that place, the education system needs to nurture creative young people. That isn’t happening right now, he says.

EDUCATORS CAN HELP

Most political leaders and education experts agree that the education system needs to adapt to the technological realities of the age and work to produce more creative thinkers. “The whole culture is coming out with support for more and greater creativity in students,” said R. Keith Sawyer, professor of education and psychology studying creativity and learning at Washington University in St. Louis, at the same conference.

Sawyer says fostering creativity starts by recognizing that it’s a collaborative process, not one big idea from a genius. Rather, it’s more like improvisational theater. “Each person contributes a small idea or contribution and the next person picks it up and takes it somewhere,” Sawyer said. “It’s unpredictable and unplanned but something wonderful emerges.”

Recognizing that much of the creative work generated comes out of collaborative group work, teachers can think about their classrooms as places for improvisational flow, where teachers and students are building knowledge together. Structure is needed, but some flexibility as well.

“The role of the educator is to channel and guide what is fundamentally an improvisational process,” Sawyer said. “Students learn what they need to learn but in a way that allows them to be creative.”

To arrive at an improvisational classroom, educators can move away from an instructional model for the classroom. The traditional model clings to the notion that children need to learn particular facts and it’s the teacher’s job to impart that information to students. Facts and information build incrementally and turn into more complex ideas, and learning is measured by testing knowledge of facts.

But many argue that this model results in superficial knowledge and low retention, weak transfer to new situations, inability to integrate facts and apply to other situations, Sawyer said.

Sawyer proposes that schooling should be constructionist, focusing on a deeper, conceptual understanding of topics with the ability to build new knowledge in new situations. To do this, students need to take facts, skills, and concepts and apply them to real-word problems. Learning should start with a driving question. This way, students can explore the topic through inquiry and discussion, working in teams, just as they would in the workplace or other life situations. Students create a tangible product that addresses the issue at hand, and along the way an instructor guides the process.

Sawyer is not naïve about the challenges to this model. It’s hard to develop a good design question. “The really good problems are not too hard, not too easy and they result in the acquisition of required content,” Sawyer said. But even after coming up with a perfect problem, it’s difficult to get students to actively engage and to collaborate effectively. It’s hard to assess learning this way and to effectively critique in a way that doesn’t stunt ideas, but helps guide the process.

It may seem daunting to change the current system into something that resembles the constructionist model Sawyer and others champion. But Sawyer said it’s happening in schools across the country, and educators are passing along these ideas to each other.

[RELATED READING: Fostering Creativity Is Not An Option]

“Every teacher is a creative professional,” Sawyer said. “And in the ideal world, every teacher is contributing these small ideas, engaging in mutual tinkering. But we have to share with others, we can’t keep it in the classroom.” The creative act of teaching needs to be a collaborative one, like a startup team working on the next innovative product. If each teacher continues to tinker and offer ideas to the larger group, a creative breakthrough will emerge.

“It’s going to be every one of us that contributes ideas along the way,” Sawyer said. And in doing so, teachers everywhere can create the institutional change that stands between them and implementing the ideas that to many are obvious and instinctual.

Sue Mellon

By Barbara Ray

At the beginning, people thought she was nuts. Sue Mellon, gifted support coordinator for Springdale Junior and Senior High/Colfax School in the Allegheny Valley School District, thought 7^th and 8^thgraders could develop a deeper understanding of poetry by playing around with robotics.

“Originally, people looked at me like I was crazy,” Mellon said. Now, two years later, Robotics Poetry is a staple of language arts classes at Springdale and a new grant has students preparing to be peer mentors.

Poetry isn’t always easy for students. But with hands-on engagement, they gain new understanding. Take Robert Frost’s “Pasture.” Instead of just reading and discussing the work in a typical classroom setting, students made 21st-century dioramas with robotic tool kits containing sensors, motors, LEDs, and a controller. One student made a blue plastic wrap lake in an old cardboard photocopy-paper box that vibrated, thanks to the motor, and, lit up, thanks to the LED. When the student said the word “water”—students record themselves reading the poems aloud in the audio-editing program Audacity—the LED turned the plastic wrap a deeper shade of blue. When he got to the bit about the “tottering” calf, the motor made the toy calf vibrate.

“A lot of kids aren’t crazy about poetry,” Mellon said. “But we have to help them engage with it. After spending two weeks analyzing the poem and creating visual imagery and symbolism for their dioramas, they really understand the work and get quite passionate.”

Stories like Mellon’s can be found all around the Allegheny School District these days as the area, already renowned for its groundbreaking work in STEM, takes on STEAM.

[RELATED READING: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype]

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math; it’s become a shorthand way for talking about how to prepare American students for a 21st-century, globalized economy. But, as STEM took hold, some begun to wonder if there was a component missing. Enter the STEAM movement, championed by people like John Maeda, president of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, and former engineer Georgette Yakman. The idea is fairly simple: STEM needs to include art and design.

“STEAM is not a new curriculum,” Yakman said. “It’s a framework for teaching.” On February 14, the idea got the Beltway stamp of approval when the Congressional STEAM Caucus launched.

CRITICAL FOR INNOVATION

The move to include art and design in the push to advance science, engineering, and math is not just a “feel-good” move. It’s critical to the future economy and families’ standard of living. Researchers are finding that although children’s IQ scores have been steadily rising, results on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking—a key measure of creativity—have been on the decline since 1990, just as the demand for more creative thinkers is rising. In a 2010 IBM survey, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as a top leadership competency of the future.

That’s why the “A” for arts is so important, and why Pittsburgh’s school districts and afterschool networks are taking arts and design so seriously.

Arts & Bots/ Carnegie Mellon University

For some members of the Allegheny Valley School District, that extra A isn’t as radical as it may seem.

“We’ve always been STEAM based,” said Ed McKaveney, technology director for the Hampton Township School District. “It just didn’t have a name before.”

For others, it has slightly different meanings.

“The A is the creative element,” said Jennifer Vecchio, assistant elementary principal at Colfax Upper Elementary. “It’s looking at birds flying and understanding what that has to do with velocity.”

Bart Rocco, superintendent of the Elizabeth Forward School District, said the transition from STEM to STEAM isn’t really about adding anything at all.

“Personally, I’m not a big acronym guy,” Rocco said. “Science, technology, engineering, math, art—that’s all really important. But really, integration is what’s the issue. That’s the critical piece.”

Both Vecchio and Rocco are right, according to Linda Hippert, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU), a state agency that supports school districts in Allegheny County. Together with Intermediate Unit 1 in neighboring counties, the AIU oversees the Center for Creativity, an initiative that offers STEAM grants to enable teachers and administrators to implement classroom-based programs integrating left-brain and right-brain learning.

[RELATED READING: Nurturing the Next Van Gogh? Start With Small Steps]

For Hippert, the story really started one October afternoon six years ago at a professional development event for local superintendents. They’d all read Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind,” and then Pink came in to discuss the importance of creativity. He spoke to them about the importance of “right-brain qualities” like empathy and inventiveness.

“The message was loud and clear,” Hippert said. “And that’s when the movement started. Being strong in math and science wasn’t enough. To meet future workforce needs, we had to address the whole-brain needs of our students.”

That kind of thinking is absolutely right.

REAL WORLD PROJECTS

As Enrico Moretti in his book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” notes, for the first time in history, “the factor that is scarce is not physical capital, but creativity.” The decline is driving the divergence in economies and in families’ wallets. The majority of a product’s value today, he writes, comes from its original idea, not the manufacturing of it. The latter can be done cheaply almost anywhere else, but the “good” jobs lie in innovation, design, and engineering.

As Pittsburgh well knows, the sector responsible for raising the wages of American workers was once manufacturing. Today, as Moretti writes, “the innovation sector determines the salary of many Americans, whether they work in innovation or not.”

[RELATED READING: Hands-On Science Exams Reveal Students' Skills]

This thinking is evident throughout the Allegheny School District.

“The question is how do we keep our students competitive,” said Bille Rondinelli, superintendent of the South Fayette School District. “The answer is whole-brain thinking.”

One of the keys to success in implementing these ideas lies in collaborations and partnerships.

In South Fayette, students work with kitchenware maker All-Clad. Five years ago, when the partnership started, it focused on manufacturing and ran under a STEM grant. Now, students are helping design the pots and pans of the future and considering issues of environmental packaging. This new, more creative work is being done under a STEAM grant.

The Allegheny Valley School District is using its STEAM grant to start a Living Class Room for upper elementary students. At the beginning of this school year, students started building an outdoor space where they designed and planted a garden. They’re also working on environmental issues like rain collection, solar cells, and composting. They design and make their own tables to use in the garden and use of iPads to identify birdcalls and keep their digital journals.

“STEAM offers a total experience for children,” said Cheryl Griffith, superintendent of Allegheny Valley School District, which is also home to Sue Mellon’s Robotics Poetry.

In the West Allegheny School District, high school students can take an electronic and acoustic sound class where they learn the science of sound, but, instead of sitting at their desk reading from a textbook, they’re studying and modifying different instruments.

Next year, the West Allegheny School District hopes to start a middle school game center. Chris Assetta, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, has a date on her calendar to go visit the Elizabeth Forward School District, which launched one in January 2012.

Heather Hibner is an English teacher who now teaches in the Elizabeth Forward Entertainment Technology Academy (ETA). If you walked by the four long windows of her classroom you’d see “people getting things done,” Hibner said. “If you walk by what I now call a boring classroom, it looks more orderly but really everyone is just zoned out.”

[RELATED READING: Why Learning Should be Messy]

It’s a lot messier in her classroom, Hibner said, but that’s because the students are engaged. They’re working in teams and at their own pace. They’re doing independent projects, modding games, and coming up with stories.

Curriculum for the ETA starts with a history of games going back to ancient Babylon. Then students go on to learn things like 3D design, scripting, storytelling, and computer programming.

“Today, you need teachers who can integrate both sides of the brain,” Rocco said.

According to Hibner, doing whole-brain teaching isn’t difficult but actually feels more natural. The real key, she said, is getting out of the way. “I’m a facilitator really,” she said. “I talk for five minutes and I work one-on-one, but I’m not the ‘sage on the stage’ anymore; really the students are their own guides.”

This post originally appeared on Remake Learning.

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Bestselling author and educational expert Alan November’s new book Who Owns the Learning?: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age compiles lessons learned over 30 years of educational experience. Beginning with his first teaching job, November began to realize that the most powerful education happens when students take ownership of their learning and when they feel that what they produce contributes meaningfully to a community.

Using those two principles as his guide, November’s book profiles innovative teachers’ efforts to make learning meaningful to their students, sharing concrete ways to transform schools. The book uses the family farm as a metaphor to explain the importance of making students central contributors to the modern education system. The excerpt below helps explain the type of work students could do in this model and how technology can help along the way.

Owning Their Learning: Student Jobs on the Digital Learning Farm

Perhaps the greatest role shift in the Digital Learning Farm model is that of the student. As we help to transform students from passive receptors of information into active drivers of their educational experiences and designers of their educational goals, we need to provide them with the incentives of meaningful work and authentic audiences. Here are the four types of jobs for students that we will discuss in this book:

1. Tutorial designers
2. Student scribes
3. Student researchers
4. Global communicators and collaborators

Tutorial Designers

Students often learn better from other students; they listen more intently, understand more completely, and participate more readily. Using webcams, video software, and other freely available recording and broadcasting tools, students can create tutorials that other students, parents, and viewers can access and use from any location. As you will learn in chapter 2 (page 25), teacher Eric Marcos and his students from Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California, have energized their school through the use of screencasted tutorials they produce. Creating tutorials increases student engagement and provides struggling students with more opportunities for reviewing troubling concepts. As one of Eric’s students reminds us, “In order to teach it you really have to learn it” (personal communication, December 2011).

Student Scribes

Not all students take excellent notes every day, but free online collaboration tools can give any class the opportunity to collaboratively build one set of perfect notes. Using a shared blog, wiki, Google Docs, or another collaborative writing tool, students work together to create a detailed set of notes that can be used by the entire class. (Visit go.solution-tree.com/instruction for live links to the websites mentioned in this book.) Darren Kuropatwa, a high school calculus teacher, uses this student scribe technique to transform his classroom into a collaborative learning community. In chapter 3 (page 39), you will learn more about Darren’s student scribe program in which each day a new student is responsible for taking notes and collecting diagrams that become part of his class’s online calculus textbook. Using a student scribe program encourages students who don’t take notes to do so, and it helps students who struggle to take good notes improve their technique through positive feedback and advice from their teachers and peers.

Student Researchers

Many classrooms have one computer sitting in the back of the room or on the teacher’s desk that gets very little use while instruction is taking place. What if that computer became the official research station where one student each day was responsible for finding answers to all the questions in class—including the teacher’s questions? Assigning students the research job can be a very effective learning tool, and it’s an incredibly simple process: each day, assign a different student to sit by that computer. When questions come up during class, it is that student’s responsibility to search out the correct answer. In chapter 4 (page 49), you will learn details about using this student job to build a class search engine that meets course standards for curriculum content and reliability of resources. Training students in the role of researcher offers guided opportunities and teachable moments that allow them to hone their research skills.

Global Communicators and Collaborators

It wasn’t that long ago when it was cost prohibitive to have your class connect with other classes and subject experts around the world. That time is gone! In an ever-shrinking world, we now have free access to make these very connections. In chapter 5 (page 65), you learn how educators are using Skype and other online tools to establish and maintain working relationships via the Internet with classrooms and topic experts from around the world. (Visit go.solution-tree.com/instruction for live links to the websites mentioned in this book.) Students can develop questions, conduct interviews, and build their skills in online learning and collaboration with people from different countries and cultures. This Digital Learning Farm job offers hundreds of opportunities for any adventurous group of students to bring the world into its classroom.

These jobs offer just four examples of work that gives students valuable opportunities to make real contributions to their learning community. While educators can implement these and other student jobs individually, we can create a more balanced approach to teaching and learning by bringing multiple jobs together to work in harmony. I have talked with educators who assign different jobs to their students. If the work results in meaningful activities that advance student contributions and ownership in the learning process, it probably deserves a place in the classroom.

Jamie Nast/Flickr

Helping students learn how to learn: That’s what most educators strive for, and that’s the goal of inquiry learning. That skill transfers to other academic subject areas and even to the workplace where employers have consistently said that they want creative, innovative and adaptive thinkers. Inquiry learning is an integrated approach that includes kinds of learning: content, literacy, information literacy, learning how to learn, and social or collaborative skills. Students think about the choices they make throughout the process and the way they feel as they learn. Those observations are as important as the content they learn or the projects they create.

“We want students thinking about their thinking,” said Leslie Maniotes a teacher effectiveness coach in the Denver Public Schools and one of the authors of Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. “We want them reflecting on the process and the content.” Inquiry learning works best on longer, deep dive projects when students have to create something of their own out of what they’ve found.

A good example is a long term research project. There are several common stages in longer projects and researchers have studied how students feel, think and act around the different stages. Students initiate the project, select a topic, explore it further, begin to formulate an approach, collect specific materials relevant to a focus and finally present on their findings.

During the process, students will go through different stages of emotions. They might feel uncertainty as they begin, optimism when they select a project, then confusion or frustration when they’ve gathered a lot of information and don’t know where to go with it. As they begin to sift through the information, they gain a sense of clarity and direction and begin formulating and executing the project. By the end of the process, they’ll have a sense of satisfaction or disappointment on the outcome of their presentation.

[RELATED READING: Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning]

Understanding how students may feel as they move through the stages of inquiry offers educators the opportunity to intervene at critical moments when frustration threatens to derail them. Research shows that letting students spend longer time exploring a topic before choosing helps them choose something worthy of inquiry. “Jumping right into identifying a question leads to low level learning,” said Maniotes. She offers specific and simple tools to help guide the inquiry learning process.

FIVE TOOLS TO GUIDE INQUIRY LEARNING

1. 1. An Inquiry Community is the class itself. Each member is exploring a topic related to the same class unit and students can help one another clarify ideas. “All of this is set within the social context of an inquiry community,” said Maniotes. “We value that community and we’re using all these other tools to inform the level of conversation we might have within that community.”
2. 2. An Inquiry Circle is a small group where students can talk to one another around a specific topic that fits within the umbrella of the broader class unit. Inquiry circles are a place for students to talk out all their wild ideas and work best when instructors leave them alone.
3. 3. The Inquiry Journal is one of the most powerful tools in the inquiry learning repertoire and should be utilized throughout the process. It’s a place for students to reflect on both the process and the content they discover as they go along. It’s important to emphasize to students that the journals should be used to reflect on how he or she learns best and what feelings come up at different points in the process. It’s meant to give them a moment to stop and think about what they’ve read and why it’s important. The journal can also be a good bridge between the student and instructor.
4. 4. The Inquiry Log helps students to keep track of the learning journey and every choice, change in direction or exciting moment along the way. “When they are able to see where they came from and where they got to it is very powerful for them,” said Maniotes.
5. 5. The Inquiry Chart is a great tool to help students identify a central question. They can chart, brainstorm and map their ideas in many ways. Getting them down on paper can help visualize what areas of research are well fleshed out and would make good focus points and which are tangential. Part of inquiry learning is teaching students how to make good academic decisions on resources and content, as well as recognizing when persistence is needed to dig deeper.

Taken together these five tools, which are deceptively simple, can give students the experience of deeper inquiry, insight into their own learning habits and preferences, as well as the experience of working through emotions that arise during the process. All these experiences help them to encounter the next challenge effectively, even when not being asked to follow a rigid process.

[RELATED READING: How to Fuel Students' Learning Through Their Interests]

Inquiry learning should also be a social and language-based process. “Inquiry tools support English language use,” said Maniotes. “Students are able to use authentic language and they are constantly speaking, reading, writing, and viewing throughout the process.” It also helps to set clear expectations for the project and to routinely use the tools so students recognize their function. When instructors reflect on how the tools are used at various points, modeling meta-cognitive processing about how the tools support the inquiry process, students do more of that too. “If students hear that kind of talk then they know how to do it themselves,” said Maniotes.

The tools also give instructors a way to assess student learning along the way. This type of formative assessment gives teachers a chance to intervene and shape the inquiry process or offer encouragement. The journal and log especially tell a teacher a lot about the process each student went through to arrive at a final presentation, offering far more data points for assessment.

Erin Scott

For many educators, helping students direct their own learning is a priority. Educator and author Alan November, who has been talking about ways to get students to own their learning for years, draws on his experiences as a teacher, principal and education consultant to tell stories about some of the ideas he sees as integral to education.

November joined Steve Hargadon in a discussion of his new book Who Owns the Learning: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age, stressing the importance of global collaboration and the role of technology in making it all possible. Here are a few highlights from their discussion.

SCHOOL STRUCTURE CAN HOLD STUDENTS BACK

School often means rules and regulations that can seem unrelated to the broader goals of education. Students are told to sit down, be still, show up at specific times, and demonstrate knowledge in ways that have nothing to do with the real world. As a case in point, November talked about when he started his teaching career at a reform school for boys where the administration took rules seriously. He discovered that one of his students had been breaking into his classroom to practice coding at night. The student showed a rare passion for a subject that wasn’t even being taught at that time, stayed focused on the task and was self-directed – qualities normally valued by educators. At a time when few people knew even how to use a computer, this boy was teaching himself to code. But none of it mattered to an administration more concerned that he’d broken the rules.

November pointed out the similarities between learning to code and the movement toward instant feedback with some of the newest ed tech tools: engineers can test a string of code to see if it works, retrace steps to figure out where it went wrong if it doesn’t. In the same way, many blended learning methods provide the same kind of instant feedback into the classroom, allowing both the learner and the instructor to understand where to shift direction to gain understanding. November says that instant feedback trend should be embraced as a powerful learning tool.

The lesson from this, he said, is to “teach students how to solve any problem, a general problem solving approach. And teach them to do it in community.” That’s what’s really going to serve them as they go through life. The benefit of technology is that is has opened the door on the scope of global problems that students can involve themselves with, making their problem solving skills immediately relevant and encouraging self-direction.

HAVE STUDENTS LOST THE ABILITY TO DEFINE THE QUESTION?

“We might have robbed kids’ natural ability to take control of defining their own problems by spoon-feeding them little tiny problems one at a time, which ended up with students not being able to take the initiative to define their own,” November said. He illustrated this point by describing a class where he asked students to identify a community problem and then work to come up with a solution. He told them he’d be there to offer tools and to support them through the process. A student raised her hand and told him that it was his job as the teacher to come up with the problems and their job as students to give answers.

Students and teachers alike have been brought up in an educational system that mimics an antiquated job market. The teacher is the boss, managing the work of his student workers who have to produce goods that meet approval, he said. But many people fear that system no longer serves students headed toward a less certain future, one that could necessitate that a student be able to define and create her own job.

“What concerns me is that school is way out of balance,” November said. “We are under an assumption in school that all these kids are going to apply to a job and have a boss that manages their work.” He thinks schools are drastically underestimating children’s capabilities to invent and own their work and by extension the contributions they can make to the world.

TECHNOLOGY RECREATES THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

As antiquated as it might seem in a world of iPads, mobile devices and 3D printers, November thinks schools should try to embody some of what worked about the one-room schoolhouse. Teachers taught all students regardless of age or level — by definition there had to be differentiation in learning.

“The reality of a one-room classroom is that the older kids are teaching the younger kids,” November said. “And it turns out that to teach, students really have to learn the material well. And the students also take more ownership of the school.” One way to replicate that ownership now is to give students classroom jobs, allowing them to contribute something powerful to the classroom dynamic. “From that beginning I think we can have deeper conversations about children taking more control of defining their roles,” November said.

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He thinks technology has the power to bring the one-room schoolhouse back. Students can help one another, connect and collaborate globally. They can contribute meaningful work that can matter to real-world situations. “The real revolution is information and global communication, not technology,” November said. Technology is merely the means to access the information and share it in community.

November gave an example of a middle school teacher who had his students contribute to a wiki that supplemented the textbook. They wrote and diagrammed material that would be passed on to students following them. One of the teacher’s former students contacted him while in high school asking to revise the part of the wiki he’d worked on three years previously. He said he’d learned more now and felt a sense of responsibility for what he’d produced. Getting students to care on that level and to be responsible for one another is exactly the kind of shared exploration in community that education should encourage, he said.