MindShift » Department of Education

How to Foster Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance: An Educator’s Guide

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:45:47 +0000

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How can we best prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century? This question is at the heart of what every educator attempts to do on a daily basis. Apart from imparting content of knowledge and facts, however, it’s becoming clear that the “noncognitive competencies” known as grit, perseverance, and tenacity are just as important, if not more so, in preparing kids to be self-sufficient and successful.

To that end, the Department of Education’s Office of Technology has released a report called Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance —Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, drafted by research firm SRI International, which addresses how educators can integrate these ideas into their teaching practice: Are these competencies malleable and teachable? How significant a role do they play in students’ success? What are the best learning environments to encourage and foster these attributes?

“The test score accountability movement and conventional educational approaches tend to focus on intellectual aspects of success, such as content knowledge. However, this is not sufficient,” the report states. “If students are to achieve their full potential, they must have opportunities to engage and develop a much richer set of skills.”

The entire report [PDF] is well worth the read. Here are a few noteworthy highlights excerpted from different parts of the report.

What Are Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance?

Grit, tenacity, and perseverance are multifaceted concepts encompassing goals, challenges, and ways of managing these. We integrate the big ideas from several related definitions in the literature to a broad, multifaceted definition of grit for the purpose of this report: “Perseverance to accomplish long-term or higher-order goals in the face of challenges and setbacks, engaging the student’s psychological resources, such as their academic mindsets, effortful control, and strategies and tactics.”

Sociocultural context plays an important role. It can be a significant determinant of what students value and want to accomplish, the types of challenges they face, and the resources they can access. It is well documented that students from high-poverty backgrounds are particularly likely to face great stress and limited social support for academic achievement— factors which can undermine perseverance toward a wide range of goals. Researchers and educators also highlight concerns about the challenges faced by students from other segments of the socioeconomic spectrum. For example, researchers and educators are exposing how grit can be detrimental when it is driven by a fear-based focus on testing and college entry. This can undermine conceptual learning, creativity, long-term retention, mental health, and ability to deal with “real-world” challenges.

Students can develop psychological resources that promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance. Our research pointed to three facets—all of which have been shown to be malleable and teachable in certain contexts:

Academic mindsets. These constitute how students frame themselves as learners, their learning environment, and their relationships to the learning environment. They include beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, values, and ways of perceiving oneself. Compelling evidence suggests that mindsets can have a powerful impact on academic performance in general, and in particular on how students behave and perform in the face of challenge. A core mindset that supports perseverance is called the “growth mindset”—knowing “My ability and competence grow with my effort.”
Effortful control. Students are constantly faced with tasks that are important for long-term goals but that in the short-term do not feel desirable or intrinsically motivating. Successful students marshal willpower and regulate their attention during such tasks and in the face of distractions. While this can seem austere or “no fun,” research shows that students stronger in these skills are happier and better able to handle stress.
Strategies and tactics. Students are also more likely to persevere when they can draw on specific strategies and tactics to deal with challenges and setbacks. They need actionable skills for taking responsibility and initiative, and for being productive under conditions of uncertainty—for example, defining tasks, planning, monitoring, changing course of action, and dealing with specific obstacles.

Measuring Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance

There are many different types of measurement methods, each with important tradeoffs.

Self-report methods typically ask participants to respond to a set of questions about their perceptions, attitudes, goals, emotions, beliefs, and so on. Advantages are that they are easy to administer and can yield scores that are easy to interpret. Disadvantages are that people are not always valid assessors of their own skills, and self-reports can be intrusive for evaluating participants’ in-the-moment perceptions during tasks.

Informant reports are made by teachers, parents, or other observers. Advantages are that they can sidestep inherent biases of self-report and provide valuable data about learning processes. The main disadvantage is that these measures can often be highly resource- intensive—especially if they require training observers, time to complete extensive observations, and coding videos or field notes.

School records can provide important indicators of perseverance over time (e.g., attendance, grades, test scores, discipline problems) across large and diverse student samples. Advantages are the capacity to identify students who are struggling to persevere and new possibilities for rich longitudinal research. Disadvantages are that these records themselves do not provide rich information about individuals’ experiences and nuances within learning environments that may have contributed to the outcomes reported in records.

Behavioral task performance measures within digital learning environments can capture indicators of persistence or giving up. Advantages are that new methods can be seamlessly1 Some people equate “dispositions” with traits that people are born with and/or cannot change. In this brief, and particularly in the context of measurement, we use the term to mean enduring tendencies, independent of any claims about their origin or malleability. The extent to which dispositions are changeable, malleable, or teachable will be highly dependent on what the disposition is and the nature of the opportunities that individuals encounter.

Programs and Models for Learning Environments to Promote Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance

We reviewed approximately 50 programs and models for promoting grit, tenacity, and perseverance, and developed five conceptual clusters based on targeted age level, learning environment, and which facets of the hypothesized model are addressed or leveraged. While there is still a need for more empirical evidence that these factors can be taught as transferable competencies across situations, there are a wide range of promising programs and approaches. The five conceptual clusters are as follows (discussed in detail in Chapter 4).

School readiness programs that address executive functions. These programs at the preschool and early elementary school levels help young children develop the effortful control that is necessary for the transition into formal schooling. Approaches include training with games, aerobic exercise and sports, martial arts and mindfulness practices, and classroom curricula and teacher professional development. Many programs have substantial empirical evidence of their success, and a major finding is that children best develop attention regulation and self-control when they can practice skills in a supportive environment that addresses cognitive, social, and physical development together.

Interventions that address mindsets, learning strategies, and resilience. There is growing research demonstrating that brief interventions (e.g., 2 to 10 hours) can significantly impact students’ mindsets and learning strategies, and, in turn, academic performance. Empirically based mindset interventions include activities that explicitly teach students to have a “growth mindset” (i.e., that intelligence grows with effort), help students frame difficulty not as personal failings but as important “bumps in the road” on the way to success, provide students opportunities to affirm their personal values to maintain clarity about why they are investing their efforts, help relate course materials to students’ lives, or incorporate multiple approaches to address different needs. Empirically based learning strategies interventions include those that help students clarify their goals and anticipate in advance how to deal with likely obstacles, develop general study skills, build a resource-rich social network, or develop content-specific metacognitive skills to monitor progress. Some programs build these types of skills as protective positive assets that support resilience in the face of adversity.

Alternative school models and school-level reform approaches. We reviewed three types of approaches. The “character education” models include explicit articulation of learning goals for targeted competencies, clear and regular assessment and feedback of student progress, intensive teacher professional development, and discourse about these competencies throughout the school culture. In the “project-based learning and design thinking” models, students develop competencies through engagement in long-term, challenging, and/or real-world problems that require planning, monitoring, feedback, and iteration. Mindsets are addressed inherently in processes of feedback and iteration, and projects are often aligned with students’ interests and passions. The third type of approach is that of organizations providing support for schoolwide improvement, such as teacher professional development, networks of school communities, and strategies to improve school organizational structure. There is strong anecdotal evidence of these models’ success, but further research is needed to determine impacts.

Informal learning programs. We reviewed informal learning programs that provide different kinds of support for persistence. Several provide structured social support networks for students who are the first in their families to go to college. Such programs provide academic support, community involvement, and guidance in the processes of college exploration, application, and initial college adjustment. Other types of programs focus on activities to spark and support interest and persistence in STEM professions. Many programs are beginning to teach explicitly about grit, drawing on models similar to those discussed in the character education models above. In most cases, there is strong anecdotal evidence of their success, but further research is needed to determine impacts.

Digital learning environments, online resources, and tools for teachers. We reviewed educational technologies aligned with each aspect of the hypothesized model: digital learning environments that provide optimal challenge through adaptivity; digital tools to help educators promote a rigorous and supportive classroom climate; resources, information, materials, tools, or human capital to accomplish difficult goals; motivating learning environments that trigger interest; teaching about academic mindsets; promoting learning strategies; and promoting the development of effortful control. Data is available showing impacts of many of these technologies.

Learning Environments That Promote Grit

When students have big and important goals, educators can promote perseverance by providing support. Just as there is an array of types of goals, there is also a wide variety of challenges, setbacks, obstacles, and adversities that students may encounter in pursuit of their goals. We first examine this variety of challenges, and then take a close look at two dimensions of learning environments that can be important for supporting perseverance.

There are a variety of different types of challenges and setbacks, many with extremely different implications for the resources necessary to persevere. Examples follow:

Conceptual complexity or lack of tactical knowledge. When the goals are around learning content, many students are challenged by the conceptual complexity. Students may also be challenged by lack of tactical knowledge about how to handle new or large goals that require planning and monitoring, for example, a long-term inquiry-based science project or taking the steps necessary throughout high school to get into college.
More dominant distractions, lack of intrinsic motivation, boredom. No matter how worthy a long-term goal may be, students will encounter particular subtasks or periods of time when other activities, such as surfing the Internet or hanging out with friends, may seem much more attractive in the short-term. Inevitably, students face choices about how they will spend their time and focus their attention.
Lack of resources. Time, materials, and human resources can be essential for accomplishing many goals. Lack of resources can be a critical obstacle to a wide range of goals.
Adverse circumstances. Students of all socioeconomic backgrounds may face adverse circumstances, such as illness, bullying, neighborhood violence, family difficulties, social alienation or racism, moving to a new school, and so on. It can be challenging to maintain focus and direction toward long-term goals in the face of such obstacles.While these categories are not meant to be exhaustive, they begin to point to the types of resources that students will need as they face big goals. Here we discuss two dimensions— cultural and tangible resources.Supportive and rigorous learning environment culture. The National Research Council 2003 report, Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn, includes an extensive review of the research literature on how to set up learning environments to support motivation for the nation’s most vulnerable students. According to this report, cultures are supportive when they have the following characteristics: (1) they promote beliefs about competence, (2) they promote relevant values and goals, and (3) they promote social connectedness and belonging.

Students will persist more when they perceive that they are treated fairly and with respect, and adults show they care about them.

Students will persist more when teachers, administrators, and others in the school environment have high expectations for students’ success and hold students to high standards. These can be conveyed explicitly or implicitly. When remedial support is necessary, it is provided in ways that do not feel punitive or interfere with opportunities to engage in other interest-driven activities.

Evaluation of student performance should be carefully designed not to undermine perceptions of competence and future expectations. It should be based on clearly defined criteria, provide specific and useful feedback, and be varied to give students opportunities to demonstrate competence in different ways.

Extrinsic rewards and punishments that undermine intrinsic motivation should be avoided. Authoritarian discipline policies that limit students’ options and opportunities for self-expression undermine intrinsic motivation and persistence.

The Dark Side of Grit

Persevering in the face of challenges or setbacks to accomplish goals that are extrinsically motivated, unimportant to the student, or in some way inappropriate for the student can potentially induce stress, anxiety, and distraction, and have detrimental impacts on students’ long-term retention, conceptual learning, and psychological well-being.

As grit becomes a more popular notion in education, there is a risk that poorly informed educators or parents could misuse the idea and introduce what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”—the tendency to overvalue personality-based explanations for observed behaviors and undervalue situational explanations. In other words, there is a risk that individuals could overattribute students’ poor performance to a lack of “grittiness” without considering that critical supports are lacking in the environment.

Perseverance that is the result of a “token economy” that places a strong emphasis on punishments and rewards may undermine long-term grit; in particular, while these fundamentally manipulative supports can seem to “work” in the short-run, when students go to a different environment without these supports, they may not have developed the appropriate psychological resources to continue to thrive.

In our interview with psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford University, she discussed an emerging trend that many undergraduate students have developed the expectation that their decisions about their studies and professional direction must come from an inherent “passion”—rather than through the effort and work of fully engaging in what they are doing. While a rare few may be driven by specific passions, for many students, this expectation is false and can undermine their persistence when they begin to encounter challenges in a chosen direction.

What’s Worth Investing In? How to Decide What Technology You Need

Tina Barseghian — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:19:46 +0000

Lenny Gonzalez

The promise of technology in the pursuit of learning is vast — and so are the profits. The SIIA valued the ed-tech market at $7.5 billion. With daily launches of new products promising to solve all manner of problems — from managing classrooms to engaging bored students with interactive content to capturing and organizing data, to serving as a one-stop-shop for every necessary service, choosing from the dizzying number of products on the market can be confusing.

But when it comes to the specific task of helping students, what’s the best app in education? “A web browser,” said Chris Lehmann, Principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, a school that’s embraced technology for years. “Or a Google Doc, or anything that gives you the ability to make a film, or to research, to create, to connect or collaborate,” he said.

“If all we’re doing is valuing test scores, then we’re just using technology to deliver the same traditional curriculum.”

Lehmann is famous in progressive education circles for his quote: “Technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” His point: The best technology allows students to explore and create “artifacts of their own learning.”

“The question is, how will technology allow students and teachers to network their learning, to collaborate with each other, to extend the reach of what kids can learn beyond the walls of the school,” he said. “How can technology be used to unlock what hasn’t even been thought of yet?”

These questions are more difficult to answer, and less tangible to measure, than improving test scores, which is what typically draws the attention of educators. But placing too much emphasis on raising test scores will eventually backfire, according to educator, author, and consultant Will Richardson, whose book Why School, was recently released.

“Technology can be an amazing thing for learning, but the way we’re looking at isn’t amazing at all,” Richardson said. “If all we’re doing is valuing test scores, then we’re just using technology to deliver the same traditional curriculum. We have to be thinking about what’s the goal of using technology. What do we want to have happen?”

The premise for using products and software that claim to raise test scores is appealing to lots of educators: leave the “drudgery” part of learning — drill and practices exercises — to software and games, which will then free up teachers’ time to take on more interesting tasks, like applying the knowledge they’ve gained to projects that can lead to deeper learning.

What To Do If Your School Bans Useful Websites

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:00:01 +0000

Today is Banned Website Awareness Day, and all across the country, educators are doing their part to raise awareness of how overly restrictive blocking of educational websites affects student learning.

The dialogue around filtering must also include bring-your-own-device policies, appropriate use of social media in schools, and overall responsible use of technology in school. Each of these issues plays an important part in the equation that influences school policy around filtering websites. For example, do students and teachers use social media sites like Edmodo or even Facebook for class purposes? Are educational videos on YouTube part of teachers’ curriculum? In large school districts, does it make sense to have individual school policies? Are students allowed to use their cell phones?

Part of the investigation into what filtering policies to put in place revolves around understanding current rules and regulations — and that’s the problem, according to Michelle Luhtala, a librarian at New Cannan High School and one of the primary organizers of Banned Websites Awareness Day.

“People believe the rules are far more restrictive than they really are.”

“People believe the rules are far more restrictive than they really are,” she said. “Most people are working off of policies that predate 2003, and so much has happened since then, and continues to happen.”

In a recent survey of nearly 700 teachers, principals, and school librarians, conducted by MMS Education and co-sponsored by edWeb.net and MCH Strategic Data, 55% of respondents said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access to Web 2.0 tools (social media sites) for teachers, and 23% said they had very restrictive policies. And when it came to students, 44% said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access, and 47% said they had very restrictive policies.

Most of the blocked sites are either social media sites, or have some element of public sharing of information, and that’s where school administrators need to be more flexible, Luhtala said. “Administration more than teachers need to open their minds to the value and potential of social networking for educational use,” wrote a survey respondent. “CIPA needs to be spelled out more specifically or made clearer to IT in education so that filters are not blocking sites unnecessarily.”

In the meantime, what should educators do when they try to access a site in school that’s blocked by the school’s filter? Luhtala offers the following advice.

PRESENT FACTS. Direct people to the Department of Education’s suggestions in this article (posted below). “This is a really valuable resource for tech directors who aren’t well informed about the details of legal aspects,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes IT directors tell other IT directors who say, ‘Just do what the lawyers say,’ and it becomes a giant case of the game Telephone. The DOE is the ultimate authority, so this article forces them to look at their agenda and policies.”
CONSIDER SMART POLICIES. Study CoSN’s Guide for Acceptable Use Policies for filtering and other issues, and their recent report Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media, which clearly states, “Before steps are taken to impose limits on the use of social media and mobile technologies in schools, policymakers and educators need to consider the consequences for learning that such restrictions would produce… Such action should carefully consider the advantages of social media for learning and that these guidelines for responsible use bring media into mentored environments where they can be safely explored and shared.”
CREATE A DIALOGUE. Start a conversation with people who manage the filtering system. “A lot of policies have been in place for 10 years or more,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes they assume products are inherently bad, but if they understand that they can be tools for learning, they can see constructive purposes.”
GET AN EARLY ADOPTER ON BOARD AND TAKE BABY STEPS. Collaborate with an innovator, and see if you can work on a project that includes a site you want unblocked. Get parent and school authorization to try out the pilot project and document the process along the way in order to share best practices. Try it out for five weeks and see how it goes.
USE AND SHARE RESOURCES. Read the American Association of School Librarian’s Essential Resources site and add your own resources to help others spread the message and educate other educators.
WADE INTO SOCIAL MEDIA. For those who have yet to start using social media with students, Luhtala suggests “take steps to try to understand what all the fuss is about.” But that will take time and training, as one survey respondent pointed out. “I believe it offers us potential opportunities to further engage our students. However, in order to maximize this potential we must provide teachers and students with additional trainings,” the anonymous respondent wrote in the survey.

When you’re ready to take action, here are the list of myths dispelled directly by the Department of Education’s Technology Director Karen Cator:

Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Three Goals to Spark Innovation and Collaboration

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:46:27 +0000

Flickr: Spacepleb

It’s been roughly two months since the launch of the Department of Education’s Digital Promise, and though it’s still very early in the process, a few pointed goals are emerging.

The main premise behind Digital Promise is to serve as a national center for research to spur innovation that will improve learning through technology, said Karen Cator, Department of Education’s Director of Technology.

At this point, the center has three goals:

1. To bring smart ideas based on sound research to those who can bring it to life. More specifically giving entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators who create new learning products a central place to access the vast amount of research that’s already been conducted about how we learn and ways to improve learning.

2. To offer challenges and prizes as an incentive to those who can find ways to vastly improve opportunities to learn.

3. To create an organization where schools and leaders can work together on problems with using technology to improve learning. This group is called the League of Innovative Schools, and at this very early stage, it’s a loosely knit collaboration of people who’ve expressed interest in becoming involved.

Within this group, there are three specific goals.

Making sure that schools and districts are informed and supportive of innovation when investing in new technologies — it’s what Cator refers to as “smart demand.”
Gathering evidence and learning more about what’s already happening in schools and districts with respect to using technology. Harvard professor and Macarthur Fellow Roland Fryer is heading up the effort of figuring out how to gather new and different kinds of evidence, Cator said.

Finding ways to learn from each other through collaboration.

For the most part, this is being headed up by Mark Edwards, superintendent of Moorseville Graded School District in North Carolina. Edwards is organizing the first meeting for the League of Innovative Schools on Nov. 28-29, with superintendents from around the country, as well as education consultants and service providers. (See more about Edwards’ views on learning technologies in this PBS Newshour video.)

At the moment, the Digital Promise Web site is very much a work in progress — a repository of comments and input from educators and school officials. Under the Grand Challenges tab, the site asks: What challenges in teaching and learning can technology help us solve? Comments include things like quality professional development for all, how to use video games for learning, how to best support innovators, how to implement flipped teaching in class, and using technology for performance assessment.

Under the League tab, the site asks: “How are you using technology to advance teaching and learning in innovative ways?” People have offered up things like offline and online mobile learning, software that tests and trains reading, and online assessments. Some of the ideas here seem to be written by those who have created educational products, but there’s also feedback from those who want to share their own experience and ideas.

Other recent initiatives from the DOE:

The Learning Registry, a central repository of online education portals where those who create education content can collaborate and share resources. What does this mean for educators? They can find a list of resources like PBS Learning Media, a trove of 16,000-plus educational digital assets and resources organized by grade and subject area, and Smithsonian Education, which provides free access to almost everything under the Smithsonian umbrella.
Microsoft will take over the DOE’s TEACH campaign, the online advocacy and recruitment program, which includes the Teach.gov site. As Edweek’s Ian Quillen points out, Microsoft has been involved with the Federal Communications Commission’s “Connect to Compete” program to bring broadband to low-income communities, “as well as launching programs to offer discounted hardware and software to educators and digital literacy training to the public.”

Should a New Tech-Innovation Agency Be Created?

Audrey Watters — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:36:14 +0000

Matt Biddulph

Today, most of the education world is focusing on how No Child Left Behind might change with the reauthorization of ESEA — the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

But as the Senate Education committee prepares to mark up ESEA, another under-the-radar amendment is also being considered — one that has historical ties to the Department of Defense.

It’s called ARPA-Ed, and it stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Education, a program President Obama proposed at the beginning of the year. If the name sounds a lot like DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that’s intentional. DARPA was established in the 1950s as a response to the Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik spacecraft and was meant to protect the United States’ technological supremacy. Although it’s a Defense Department agency, DARPA research isn’t tied to specific military missions. But it has been responsible for a number of technological innovations with sweeping implications, including, ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet.

Can the successes of the military’s R&D program be duplicated in ed-tech?

The creation of ARPA-Ed aims to tap into this history and to signal that the country urgently needs to invest in technological research to maintain its educational edge, or be at risk of falling behind.

The legacy of Sputnik and DARPA have been invoked by President Obama many times this year as he’s talked about the importance of technology and education. He talked about Sputnik specifically in his State of the Union address at the beginning of the year:

“Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal.”

As part of Obama’s 2012 budget, $90 million was earmarked for the creation of ARPA-Ed. But until the proposal of the EASA amendment by Colorado Senator Michael Bennet today, there hasn’t been any movement toward making this agency a reality.

The Department of Education says that ARPA-Ed would fund both private and public research by industry, universities, and other organizations that feed such projects as personalized digital tutors, adaptive learning platforms, and game-based learning (PDF). The administration contends that an agency like ARPA-Ed would help correct the under-investment in education technology and would in turn spur innovation in the sector, which it contends has lagged far behind others in terms of its productivity and its performance.

ARPA-Ed isn’t the only push that the Obama Administration has made into supporting education technology. It recently announced the Digital Promise, a new non-profit designed “to spur breakthrough technologies that can help transform the way teachers teach and students learn.”

What makes ARPA-Ed different then? Is this just another redundant federal agency? That’s what many opponents to the proposal are arguing, saying that it’s a duplication of funding and of effort, and Bennet’s proposed amendment is likely to face some fierce opposition as funding and philosophical battles heat up over the reauthorization of EASA.

But proponents of ARPA-Ed claim that it is different from other current efforts, in part, because its focus isn’t on teaching and learning with technology. ARPA-Ed is focused on how technology impacts learning, not teaching. (In other words, this isn’t about teaching teachers or supporting teachers to use technology more effectively in their classrooms.)

One thing is certain about ARPA-Ed: It’s part of the Obama Administration’s continuing invocation of Sputnik-era rhetoric to make the case for better educational programs. “Space Race” — “Race to the Top.” “DARPA” — “ARPA-Ed.” Are these metaphors from the 1950s and 1960s the right ones? Can the successes of the military’s R&D program be duplicated in ed-tech? And is that a model we even want to emulate?

School Will Change, With or Without Following Rules

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:07:00 +0000

Flickr:CrunchyFootsteps

Public education is, by its very nature, tangled with policy, dependent on rules and regulations set by federal, state, and district mandates. What most students do in school at any given moment has been prescribed by legislation passed years before they — or their parents — entered kindergarten.

But things are changing — and quickly. With access to the Internet and learning devices in the hands of kids and teachers, and with technology ever-evolving and becoming ever more affordable and ubiquitous, the school experience will have to change.

“We can create much more dynamic results that will change with time if we’re flexible than if we take the top-down approach from the smartest people in the world.”

This was the big message echoed yesterday by folks like the Department of Education’s Director of Technology Karen Cator, Innosight Institute’s Michael Horn, former Governor Bob Wise who’s now president of the Alliance of Excellent Education, and former Governor Jeb Bush, of the Foundation for Excellent Education. They were gathered to talk to journalists from around the country about how and where these changes are happening.

What’s unusual about this moment in time is the collision between a number of forces at work: a strong-voiced, growing grassroots movement of teachers who object to having their hands tied by an obsolete testing system, a hungry tech industry eager to jump into the education sector, a receptive Secretary of Education who wants to provide incentives for innovations, and successful examples of school models that are showing signs of high student achievement AND engagement.

But these changes will happen whether or not government on any level or the entrenched public education system mandates them.

“My recommendation is not to try to prescribe anything,” Bush said in reply to my question about schools’ trepidation in using fast-changing technology and the disruption of bring-your-own-devices models. “I think we should not do what public education has done for over 100 years — to prescribe how it needs to be. We need to make sure that we don’t pick winners and losers. We need to assume that technology will change, assume that there will be adaptive software, assume that there will be demand and there will be supply fulfilled.”

He continued: “I think we have a tendency to try to take our core beliefs and prescribe rules around how it will work. But we can create much more dynamic results that will change with time if we’re flexible than if we take the top-down approach from the smartest people in the world.”

Wise added another important point: “Legislators cannot legislate technology,” he said. “By the time you get to a consensus, that technology has leapfrogged over you. What you have to do is to provide flexibility that allows systems to move. It’s recognizing that technology is like water, it finds its levels, it moves.”

By far more important than waiting for rules to be created is to jump in. “The alternative is not to, and that’s a fatal mistake,” Wise said.

Mistakes will be made, no question. As a new testing system is created, how we measure learning will change, but all the steps to get to that ideal will go through lots of iterations, too. Whether we’ll go to competency-based rather than age-based assessments (at the moment it’s comparing apples to oranges), whether the textbook industry will crumble in the wake of free, open-source content or if it will adapt, how teachers will respond to new blended-learning models, whether the majority of online schools will prove to provide high-quality education — none of these issues will be resolved cleanly.

But from what I’m seeing, the momentum has been set in motion.