Flickr: Muli Kapul

While the open content movement in education continues to gain steam, more teachers are starting to learn about free content they can use and adapt to their own needs for their classrooms.

But educators are focusing too heavily on acquiring content, rather than contributing and improving to it, according to a company that helps teachers and students access open education resources.

“People often hear the content piece rather than the open piece,” said Bill Fitzgerald, the founder of FunnyMonkey, a Portland, Ore.-based open educational resources company, during a presentation at Educon 2.5. “And it shifts [an understanding] about what open content is.”

That shift is understandable. In education, open content refers to any textbooks, lesson plans, supplemental educational resources, or other educational artifacts that can be freely modified to suit educators’ individual needs. Access to open content is often free or more affordable than proprietary alternatives, so for cash-strapped schools and resourceful teachers who want to go beyond what traditional textbooks offer, this movement, which is being celebrated next month, can be a game-changer.

To keep the focus on the two-way direction of open content — both contribution and use — Fitzgerald and his team offered a framework of nine tips, based on “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” an essay about open source software engineering.

GOOD CONTENT COMES FROM PERSONAL PASSION.

Maybe a particular unit gets you enthused. Or maybe a lesson plan irks you because it falls short of your expectations. Either way, that enthusiasm should be the catalyst for creating, editing, or expanding upon the material, and then republishing it. Good teachers are already doing this, Fitzgerald says — except for the final step.

“The change is what actually happens when it’s done,” he says. “Instead of hitting ‘save’ and putting it on your hard drive, you’re hitting ‘publish’ and putting it on the Web.”

GREAT TEACHERS SHARE THEIR GEMS.

You probably have a lesson or two in your holster that you know is always a hit with your students. Don’t hoard them. Share them with colleagues, and acquire their go-tos as well. Be willing to alter them into a format that jives better with a different teaching style.

LICENSING IS IMPORTANT.

Open content published through open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons allow for varying degrees of modification. If you’re going to edit or combine useful items, be sure you understand their respective licenses, so you don’t find yourself in a spot where others can’t add on to your work.

HAND OFF THE LESSONS YOU’VE TIRED OF.

Just like you should seize upon enthusiasm, so you should acknowledge fatigue. And in the open content world, there’s usually a competent successor willing to put a fresh spin on your material. Also, when the time comes for you and your content to part ways, be sure to publish it in text form to make it more visible in Web searches, rather than as a PDF or Word document.

“This is kind of how it works in the software world too,” said Jeff Graham, FunnyMonkey’s lead developer. “The successful projects are the ones where people are using them, but also where people are talking about them.”

SHARE YOUR PROBLEMS; SOMEONE WILL SEE AN ANSWER.

Every teacher, administrator, parent, and student has a different skill set. Confessing your biggest challenges to the open world—and just as importantly, making sure people know it’s out there—is a strength that shows willingness to improve and may result in advice from those who can help.

COLLABORATE WITH STUDENTS AS WELL AS COLLEAGUES.

Open content isn’t only about peer-to-peer teacher-to-teacher collaboration. It should also allow you a new way to build students’ conceptual understanding by revising old items or creating new ones.

“If you have a set of resources that needs to be cleaned up, that’s a good opportunity for students,” Fitzgerald said. “And by giving your students the autonomy with the support to do this and do this right, you can create an environment where students are sharing this work. People are talking about digital literacy; that’s it.”

VALUE YOUR STUDENTS AS AN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE.

Not only can open content allow your students to tackle concepts from a new perspective, it can also pave a way for them to impart their own knowledge. Who else is closer to the challenges of learning new material for the first time than students who tackle that challenge on a daily basis? Hearing that voice can help you rethink the content you give them, and in an open content world, allow you to edit it to make it better.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF FAILURE

Remember telling your students that you learn the most when you fall short? Time to practice what you preach. And sharing when, why and how you fall short in an open content community can often lead to input that results in the most innovative solutions.

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“Polynomial functions!”

“Trig identities!”

“How about the properties? Commutative, associative, distributive.”

So unfolded a laundry list of what a group of math teachers considered the more painful and less necessary concepts covered in the average high school math curriculum.

The laments, aired at EduCon 2.5 in Philadelphia at Science Leadership Academy last weekend, were part of a discussion around how to rebuild math instruction under the radically different—and admittedly unlikely—parameters posed by moderator Mike Thayer, a math teacher at Summit Public Schools in New Jersey.

Thayer, who also has a background teaching high school physics, proposed a scenario in which high school freshmen would take a one-year course (or a one-semester course in a block scheduling system) that covered the essentials of Algebra 1 and 2, Geometry, and possibly parts of Trigonometry. Any additional math concepts might be learned in a cross-disciplinary fashion through other courses. For example, chemistry teachers would be responsible for teaching

students the basics of logarithms while covering the pH scale. Biology teachers would explain concepts of exponential growth to their students when discussing species population and reproduction.

The rationale of such a course, Thayer said, would be to create a version of math instruction that more fully lives with the inquiry-based learning approach embraced by the Science Leadership Academy, the public magnet high school where the conference took place. His vision—which hinges on what he concedes is a large assumption that students would enter high school competent in basic computational thinking—is for a course that would both streamline a high school student’s general math experience, and empower and encourage them to learn additional math skills to solve real-world problems of their own interest.

As one teacher at the discussion put it: “I’d like to delete polynomial functions, but I’d like my students to see a roller coaster and think, ‘There must be math involved in that,’ and to go online and try and figure that out.”

Thayer asked the teachers to consider four questions as they imagined the hypothetical course:

1. WHAT STAYS AND WHAT GOES? Consider both what concepts would get more or less emphasis, as well as what method of learning (lectures, work sheets, group work, collaborative projects, etc.) would work best.
2. NEXT STEP FOR STUDENTS? Options could include more advanced mathematics courses, independent mathematics projects, courses in other subjects that included applicable advanced math concepts, or some combination.
3. HOW WOULD TEACHING CHANGE? Choose which lessons you’d save and which lessons you’d skip. Envision whether you’d use the same kinds of exercises to develop students skills, and whether you’d structure class time in the same manner, or perhaps utilize it differently.
4. WHAT WOULD YOU ASSESS? Tests should reflect the purpose of the course, to develop students’ understanding of the theoretical and practical purposes of math.

Most of the discussion during the 90-minute talk focused on the first two points, and the group generally agreed the course would need to focus on changing student thought processes.

“What I am hearing is that if we would like to really make math meaningful for our students, we need to do things to create the ability for them to be truly mathematical thinkers,” Thayer said at one point after hearing a few responses.

There were, however, disagreements over the relative importance of concepts. And a couple of teachers even asked whether geometry would fit within the parameters of such a course.

The group also questioned whether a focus on real-world math applications would be the most likely way to spur students into independent investigation, and whether that focus could create an unintended bias in the kind of material covered. As an example, teachers noted that using tools like 101 Questions, a website that asks users to think of a question related to a displayed image, could result in an excessive focus on proportionality.

Thayer encouraged such discourse, suggesting it would be essential in his new model.

“I think the first thing for us, in order to be masters in context as well as content, is to recognize our strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “I would love for somebody else to be able to come into my classroom and explain why [a concept] is important.”

In a speech at EduCon earlier that morning, Philadelphia public schools Superintendent William Hite stressed the need for teachers to move from content to context expertise. And in a later discussion, Science Leadership Academy founding Principal Chris Lehmann conceded such an approach could be more difficult in a math classroom, but not impossible.

Thayer, meanwhile, warned that if math teachers didn’t find a way to make that difficult shift, they could be marginalized.

“Most of the stuff we teach” in traditional courses, he said, “the Khan Academy does it for free.”

Flickr: jonny goldstein

Visualization of SLA principal Chris Lehmann's 2011 talk: guiding kids' to thinking about how they think.

Nearly seven years after first opening its doors, the Science Leadership Academy public magnet high school* in Philadelphia and its inquiry-based approach to learning have become a national model for the kinds of reforms educators strive towards.

But in a talk this past weekend at EduCon 2.5, the school’s sixth-annual conference devoted to sharing its story and spreading its techniques, Founding Principal Chris Lehmann insisted that replicating his schools approach required difficult tradeoffs.

“This is not easy. This is not perfect,” Lehmann told a crowd of devotees stuffed inside one of the Center City school’s second-floor science classrooms on Sunday. “There are really challenging pieces of this, and we should be OK with this.”

Lehmann’s 90-minute question-and-answer session tackled coming to terms with the impact of a shift to inquiry-driven learning by defining three steps: the enigmatic meaning of inquiry-based learning; the visible changes that signal a shift to that approach; and the potential drawbacks that shift may surface.

INQUIRING ABOUT INQUIRY

Lehmann said it’s important to question whether alleged “personalized,” “project-based,” or “collaborative” learning efforts are actually helping students and teachers to “hold ourselves in a state of questioning.”

For example, adaptive software that leads students through English/language arts or mathematics on a pace set by their own abilities fails to force students to ask questions about that material, contextualize it in real life, or communicate about the concepts with others, Lehmann said. The same is true of collaborative projects where restrictive guidelines result in several, nearly-identical finished products across student groups.

In a true inquiry-based model, how learning happens isn’t as important as whether that learning encourages students to try to learn even more. Lehmann compared the scenario to the plight of a two-year-old child who has graduated from “yes” and “no” and proceeded onto an endless string of “why’s.”

“To me it comes down to process,” Lehmann said. “Inquiry means living in the soup. Inquiry means living in that uncomfortable space where we don’t know the answer.”

SIGNS YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT TRACK

Although nailing down inquiry-based learning is a bit like trying to define the human soul, there are some indicators Lehmann and his audience both agreed signaled progress down the right path.

To paraphrase one teacher, a classroom where students are empowered to direct and control their own learning is one sign. Feeling tension between the direction of a course and the material covered on a standardized final examination may be another, said a second teacher.

“Oh God, yeah,” Lehmann said in response to the latter teacher. “There’s a reason we don’t offer [Advanced Placement] Classes here. If we are a truly inquiry-based school, why would our highest-level classes end in a test?”

Increased collaboration between students and increasing student scrutiny of educational content were two other signs Lehmann and the group said signaled the right approach, even if they clashed with classroom norms. For example, collaboration can often lead to tricky discussions about what part of a students’ work are his or her own and what part is recycled.

Lastly, good inquiry-based learning should include a means for publication and communication, whether through blogs, printed reports, multimedia packages, etc. But Lehmann also said, in some cases, students should have the right to decide whether to publish their work.

“One of the scariest things about inquiry-based learning is the blank page,” Lehmann said. “When you’re toying with the ideas at first, sometimes your ideas don’t have to be social to the world.”

ACCEPTING THE DRAWBACKS

Inquiry-based education should improve student engagement, critical thinking skills, and cross-disciplinary opportunities, Lehmann said. But it may also hinder lesson planning, covering content benchmarks, and assessing student progress.

In a school that asks students to seize some autonomy over the course of their studies, the teachers most comfortable at the Science Leadership Academy are often the teachers most capable of improvising and deviating from a lesson plan, or even entering a class period without a lesson plan at all.

Further, while Lehmann believes the approach leaves students with the analytical tools they need to succeed on English/language arts standardized tests, he acknowledges that both teaching mathematics in general, and teaching it so students succeed on state and national benchmarks, is harder to do in an inquiry-driven fashion.

“Math is a little harder, and I own that,” said Lehmann.

Creating teacher-administered assessments that accurately measure progress, in an environment where the path is often long and winding, is also difficult.

“That could probably be 10 sessions of EduCon,” Lehmann quipped. “’What are we authentically assessing when we assess?’”

*[CLARIFICATION: Science Leadership Academy is a public magnet school, not a charter, as previously written.]