Brad's Blog

Teachers Will Matter More in the Future

The last couple of days, I have been reading a report from the Fordham Institute on the relationship between educational reform initiatives and online learning: Education Reform in the Digital Era.  I’d imagine that the report would be eye-raising to many within the independent school community, both for some of the suggestions and ideas and for the way that the current teaching and learning landscape is described.  And yet, I think that there are lots of lessons to be learned for those of us who love independent school and care about their future in an increasingly digital world.

Chapter 1 of the report “Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction” is particularly helpful in this regard. In chapter 1, Bryan and Emily Hassel (of Public Impact) make the case for teacher effectiveness in a world with an abundance of options for online education.

In the digital future, teacher effectiveness may matter even more than it does today, as these complex instructional tasks are left to the adults responsible for each student’s learning. Teachers who nurture motivated, tenacious problem solvers while using new technologies to reach more children can become the fuel of local, state, and national economies. Schools will not need as many teachers as we know them. But excellent instructors, many in new roles, will need the right technology and instructional supporting teams to achieve excellence at scale, within budget, and potentially for much higher pay than today. - Education Reform in the Digital Era, p. 12

Think about the way that the “teacher of the future” is described here: teachers matter more.  And yet, teachers don’t matter more because they are the best at explaining how to solve an equation or how to understand a Shakespearean sonnet, but because:

As digital tools proliferate and improve, solid instruction in the basics will eventually become “flat”—available anywhere globally. The elements of excellent teaching that are most difficult for technology to replace will increasingly differentiate student outcomes. - Education Reform in the Digital Era, p. 11

For a number of years, we have been working to have our faculty move from being the “sage on the stage” to being the “guide on the side.”  And, many within our faculty ranks I think have bristled at this change in their role and felt like it devalued the importance of their work.  It seems to me that Bryan and Emily Hassel may have given some of the language that we can use to help faculty understand that a new role of faculty is, in fact, perhaps more important than ever before.

Reflections on NAIS and a West Coast Swing

Late Friday night, I got home from my second trip to the West Coast in three weeks.  The first trip was for the NAIS Annual Conference and the second was to see some of the great OSG school in Los Angeles.  Both trips confirmed for me something that I have been feeling in my travels throughout the year: change is really (and finally) happening across the board within independent schools.

Perhaps paradoxically, it seems to me that this change has been sped up in the last year by a number of schools who have come to realize that there is no “silver bullet” out there to better our schools: the iPad, online learning, a one-to-one computing program, the SmartBoard, etc. alone will not make our schools and the learning happening within better.  Instead, schools are working toward harder solutions: changing faculty culture, engaging everyone in the learning process, moving to a “growth mindset,” valuing innovation, and having the hard conversations.  

This is true for the most successful schools leading the way in online learning, too.  Leading schools understand that simply expanding course catalogs through online learning does not necessarily help to better the academic program of a school.  However, if the school works with online learning programs that 1) are mission-alligned, 2) agree on general learning philosophies, 3) help fill in gaps of an existing program, 4) expand opportunities for students, and 5) work with the school as a partner not a client, then online learning can be a very valuable addition to the school.

On a macro independent school level, I have seen these ideas embraced like never before at the NAIS Annual Conference.  The Whitepaper that I recently co-wrote with my friend Michael Nachbar, the Director of the Global Online Academy, was exceptionally well received by people at the conference and in the weeks since.  There was a general buzz in the halls of the Seattle Convention Center about online learning, and the thoughtful, mission-alligned approach of the schools in the OSG and GOA consortiums.

I also thought that it was particularly telling that after the keynote address at the start of the conference from Bill Gates, the criticism from the audience (especially on Twitter) was not that he had “pushed the envelope” too far in his address on the powers of technology to help transform education, but instead there was a fairly large cry of criticism from people who believed that he had not gone far enough.  That was a sea-change for an NAIS Annual Conference.

This week in Los Angeles, I felt the change at the individual school level.  I had the chance to speak with two faculty groups this week that I had presented to last March.  Last year, when I spoke to these faculties, there was general skepticism about the Online School for Girls program and online learning, in general.  Faculty were concerned about the quality of education and, quite frankly, that their jobs were being replaced.  This year, faculty were excited by the opportunities that engaging in online learning offered both for them (through professional development and the ability to teach online themselves) and for their students.  A year into having students take online courses, the faculty had heard what the student experience was: small classes, caring teachers, personalized attention, project-driven, and, yes, challenging.  By this point, they had come to know that the Online School for Girls was created to be like them, and was really birthed from their collective efforts and those of great girls’ school educators of years past, too.  Instead of viewing OSG with skeptical eyes as the “other,” most were viewing OSG as part of them.

We are at an exciting time in independent school education.  Our community is working together on big issues in ways that we never have before.  And, we are tackling the hard questions — and that is making all the difference.

“Plunk” PD

In the past few weeks, I have been working on a number of presentations coming up for NBOA, NAIS, CAIS, ASB: Unplugged, and NCGE, and have been “booked” to speak at a number of conferences and workshops for this spring and summer.  Working on the presentations got me thinking again about a post that Alex Inman had on his blog about “Plunk” PD:

We’ve all seen this.  An administrator or teacher of influence sees a great session at a conference and says to themselves, “That is exactly the message that our school needs to hear!  We totally need to do [that] or move in [that] direction!”  Now, when the administrator or teacher of influence is thinking that, he or she almost certainly has several specific people in mind. They know those teachers who just don’t “get it.”  They just don’t move in their teaching the way they should.  “That speaker was so articulate,” they think, “if they just heard this message, this way, from this speaker, we’d be on the fast track to success!”  They book the speaker.  Everyone gathers during a professional day and the person who brought in the speaker sits proudly in the back of the room waiting for the magical transformation to occur. 

Alex goes on to talk about how that “magical transformation” does not normally occur, but instead often helps to retrench the teacher who the message was supposed to reach. Thus, by “plunking” the speaker in front of the faculty, the administrators who have brought the speaker in have perhaps moved the needle a bit in their favor, but also have not impacted meaningful and lasting change simply by having the speaker there.  As Alex concludes:

We all know that professional growth is a process. We should treat it like a focused and thoughtful process. Our teacher’s time is precious. We should avoid “plunking” someone in front of them. Make all of your PD for teachers part of something larger. Make sure they understand that larger goal. Be certain that you are meeting your teachers where they are. If not, you are wasting money, but worse, you are wasting time.

I think that Alex has a number of great points about the power (and lack thereof) that speakers have in the professional development at our schools.  It seems to me that he may be foreshadowing a change in professional development that we have been seeing in the classrooms (and that many who read this posting have been advocating for): the change from a “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” pedagogical approach.

As anyone who teaches in a “guide on the side” manner knows, there is always some need for expert opinions, data, and facts.  If this model is used for professional development, the opinions, data, and facts will come from the speaker, the summer reading book, the podcast, or the webinar.

However, as the “guide on the side” teacher also knows, even more important is the time for reflection, discussion, practice, trial, failure, and success.  This is where we often fall short in our professional development at independent schools, as Alex notes his his posting.

I think that this is why we have found success at OSG with our professional model, too. Each of our classes has two weeks to dive into the world of expert opinion, data, and facts, followed by time for reflection and discussion on the material presented.  But then in the last two weeks, it is followed by insistence that the teachers put the theory and materials into practice and then critique their “classmates” on their work.

This approach has worked well.  More than 95% of participants this past year rated the course highly.  And, when there were criticisms of the course, most often they were from teachers who wished that the information was simply presented to them and that they didn’t have to interact as much with peers— sound familiar: “Can’t you just tell me what I need to know for the test?”

I also think that there are some questions that administrators at our independent schools can ask themselves if they want to move to their school’s professional development model from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” (modeling the type of teaching that we would like to see in our classrooms):

• How are your faculty meetings conducted?  Is a lot of time spent giving information to faculty— the upcoming calendar, announcements, presentations, etc.?  Or is more time spent talking about student and classroom successes and challenges, and problem solving, and learning from each other?
• How do you allocate professional development money and encourage professional development activity?  Is most of your money going to “one-off” conferences, trips, or workshops, or is it going to more in-depth, hands-on, and reflective professional development?
• Is professional development at your school directed toward the school’s strategic initiatives?  Have the goals for professional development been clearly articulated and the vision for an outcome of the development clearly presented?

In the end, I think it gets to a simple question: “Our classrooms are changing… shouldn’t our classrooms for our teachers change, too?”

Higher Ed Online Learning Grows - What Does This Mean for Independent Schools?

The new annual review of online learning at the college level has just come out from the Sloan Consortium.  They report that:

• “Over 6.1 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.
• The 10% growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 2% growth in the overall higher education student population.
• Thirty-one percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
• Reported year-to-year enrollment changes for fully online programs by discipline show most are growing.
• Academic leaders believe that the level of student satisfaction is equivalent for online and face-to-face courses.
• 65% of higher education institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy.
• There continues to be a consistent minority of academic leaders concerned that the quality of online instruction is not equal to courses delivered face-to-face.” (Sloan Consortium: http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011)

The report shows that independent schools not engaging in online learning need to ask themselves two key questions:

• If one-third of college students are taking online courses (and 10% more are taking online courses each year), what are they doing to prepare their students for online education at the next level?
• If two-thirds of higher education institutions see online learning as a critical strategic initiative, why don’t they?