A 45 Minute Conversation With a Congressman

As a public school teacher wouldn't you just love to have a sit down conversation with your Congressman and have the chance to tell them what's up with education?  I had this opportunity to do just that with Rep Bill Posey of Florida's 8th Congressional District, who sits on the House Science and Technology Committee.

Funny story was the meeting ended up being scheduled after I was already planning to be on Capitol Hill that morning attending the STEM Diversity Symposium.  Fortunately for me, both were in the Cannon House Office Building.

Sorry to leave you Grant, but I have an 11 O'Clock with the Congressman.

Meeting Grant Imahara of MythBuster's Fame.  Was the first selfie I ever took and unfortunately it shows.

The STEM Diversity Symposium was tremendous.  I arrived early and was fortunate to be able to meet and talk with Grant Imahara for a few moments.  Basically telling him that I was an engineering technology teacher and that his work on MythBusters went a long way in inspiring youth to pursue the field.

I saw another very familiar face  - Hakeem Oluseyi the Astrophysicist from FIT and Science Channel Host of the series Outrageous Science, was also in attendance.  For years I had taken my STEAM Academy students to FIT's Laser Day event and had on many occasions sat in on discussions with Hakeem about Black Holes, Dark Energy/Matter, Star Trek physics, and the like.

Congressman Posey

When I was contacted by Rep Posey's office to schedule the meeting I was asked to prepare a brief of the things that I would like to discuss during our time together.  This activity taught me how valuable getting your thoughts together on paper is... I also came to realize in my work with NSF and other prominent agencies that it is the secret behind how highly educated people are able to turn that amazing phrase or make a really strong point... they are just quoting themselves from the briefs, abstracts, and reports that they have previously written.

Congressman Posey was very generous with his time and we had a very good discussion over the troubles in the North Area of Brevard County with the demise of the Shuttle Program.  The resultant effects from losing so many students and the brain drain from the area as technical, engineering and leadership professionals left the Space Coast.  The impact was significant on our schools as these professionals were the very backbone of Brevard County's great tradition of our students doing so well in science and engineering contests.  How for example, our high school's FIRST Robotics Team had to fold into another team due to the fact that we could no longer get sufficient engineering mentor support.

Big Three Issues Confronting Educators Today:

1.  What is the Overall State of Education and Ed Reform?
There is ongoing effort that is seeking to standardize educational content, delivery methodologies, and teacher evaluations with initiatives like common core, Next Generation Science Standards, and Race to the Top.  While certainly not everything put forth in these programs is without merit, they are largely proposed as a knee jerk reaction to the US continually getting their butts kicked internationally in standardized testing, and they are highly disruptive to other more essential elements of education that are suffering as a result.

China actually Singapore (which is the Chinese equivalent to the Boston educational community of Harvard and MIT), just ended up on top again in math and science but surprisingly they still are not excited about the results. This is a really curious reaction and the reason they feel this way about the testing results is because nationally, they have yet to enjoy a “Steve Jobs moment.” That is to say that they are still waiting for a revolutionary entrepreneur to emerge from China.  (See Yong Zhao video from the ISTE Conference San Diego, CA (2013). Scrub to about 5:20 and watch him talk about standards).

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijSxt94vhf0

YouTube video:“ISTE 2012 Tuesday Keynote Featuring Yong Zhao Trim” YouTube video, 53:38.  Posted by "Gord Holden," July 2, 2012.  

This quote from Kai-fu Lee, a Chinese venture capitalist, is also appropriate to the discussion: “The next Apple or Google will appear, but not in China...unless it abolishes its education [system].”

Interesting it is that China, while sitting at the top of the standardized testing educational heap, is looking to totally reform its educational system to be more like the American Educational System in an effort to cultivate creativity and entrepreneurship. The results of the PISA Math Scores are very instructive when compared with international entrepreneurialship quotients:

 

This is a stunning graphic showing the reverse corollary of standardized test scores to creative and entrepreneurial ability

The PISA Test measures critical thinking in math, science, and reading across 65 countries, and is designed to be demographically neutral, meaning it doesn’t care about culture, student grade level, socio-economic factors, or achievement level. It is simply an apples-to-apples comparison of 15 year olds and their problem solving ability. Given the data from the chart above, it is clear that PISA scores have a negative corollary to creative and entrepreneurial ability.

In June of 2013, the Chinese Ministry of Education launched a major reform effort to de-emphasize the importance of testing.  The following criteria are now to be used to change the way their schools are evaluated:

1. Transparent admissions. Admission to a school cannot take into account any achievement certificates or examination results. Schools must admit all students based on their residency without considering any other factors.
2. Balanced Grouping. Schools must place students into classes and assign teachers randomly. Schools are strictly forbidden to use any excuse to establish “fast-track” and “slow-track” classes.
3. “Zero-starting point” Teaching. All teaching should assume all first graders students begin at zero proficiency. Schools should not artificially impose higher academic expectations and expedite the pace of teaching.
4. No Homework. No written homework is allowed in primary schools. Schools can however assign appropriate experiential homework by working with parents and community resources to arrange field trips, library visits, and craft activities.
5. Reducing Testing. No standardized testing is allowed for grades 1 through 3; For 4^th grade and up, standardized testing is only allowed once per semester for Chinese language, math, and foreign language. Other types of tests cannot be given more than twice per semester.
6. Categorical Evaluation. Schools can only assess students using the categories of “Exceptional, Excellent, Adequate, and Inadequate,” replacing the traditional 100-point system.
7. Minimizing Supplemental Materials. Schools can use at most one type of materials to supplement the textbook, with parental consent. Schools and teachers are forbidden to recommend, suggest, or promote any supplemental materials to students.
8. Strictly Forbidding Extra Classes. Schools and teachers cannot organize or offer extra instruction after regular schools hours, during winter and summer breaks and other holidays. Public schools and their teachers cannot organize or participate in extra instructional activities.
9. Minimum of One Hour of Physical Exercise. Schools are to guarantee the offering of physical education classes in accordance with the national curriculum, physical activities and eye exercise during recess.
10. Strengthening Enforcement. Education authorities at all levels of government shall conduct regular inspection and monitoring of actions to lessen student academic burden and publish findings. Individuals responsible for academic burden reduction are held accountable by the government. 

Zhao, Yong. “Green Evaluation: China’s Latest Reform to De-emphasize Testing.” June 24, 2013.  http://zhaolearning.com/2013/06/24/green-evaluation-china%E2%80%99s-latest-reform-to-deemphasize-testing/

China wants to be like America and America wants to be like China 
- What Do You Want US to be Like?

So while America is trying desperately to compete internationally on the standardized testing front with countries like China, China is trying desperately to learn to educate its students the way we do it in America. Both countries are reforming the educational process – America toward more standards, content, more students stress and lower confidence levels and China, to fewer standards and less content, to lower student stress and increased confidence levels.  To this end the following points are salient:

1. The current education reform efforts that attempt to provide a common, homogenous, and standardized educational experience, e.g., the Common Core Standards Initiative in the U.S., are not only futile but also harmful to preparing our children for the future.
2. Massive changes brought about by population growth, technology, and globalization not only demand but also create opportunities for “mass entrepreneurship” and thus require everyone to be globally minded, creative, and entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship is no longer limited to starting or owning a business, but is expanded to social entrepreneurship, policy entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship.
3. Traditional schooling aims to prepare employees rather than creative entrepreneurs. As a result the more successful traditional schooling is (often measured by test scores in a few subjects), the more it stifles creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit.
4. To cultivate creative and entrepreneurial talents is much more than adding an entrepreneurship course or program to the curriculum. It requires a paradigm shift—from employee-oriented education to entrepreneur-oriented education, from prescribing children’s education to supporting their learning, and from reducing human diversity to a few employable skills to enhancing individual talents.
5. The elements of entrepreneur-oriented education have been proposed and practiced by various education leaders and institutions for a long time but they have largely remained on the fringe. What we need to do is to move them to the mainstream for all children.

the more successful traditional schooling is (often measured by test scores in a few subjects), the more it stifles creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit. 

 ...innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship are largely missing not only from the Chinese culture, but Asian cultures generally, due to the mechanical nature of their “efficient” schools. ...schools that emphasize content and standards at the expense of student autonomy, confidence levels, and happiness. 

Ironic it is then, that America has the creativity and entrepreneurship quotients and are moving to sacrifice them for higher test scores...

Foroohar, Rana. “China: Just as Desperate for Educational Reform as the US.” The Curious Capitalist.  Time Magazine – Business & Money. July 27, 2013. http://business.time.com/2013/06/27/china-just-as-desperate-for-education-reform-as-the-u-s/

Xueqin, Jiang. “How China Kills Creativity.” The Diplomat. July 2, 2011.

http://thediplomat.com/china-power/how-china-kills-creativity/comment-page-1/

Rotherham, Andrew, J.  “Shanghai Surprise:  Don’t Sweat Global Test Data.” Time Magazine – US.  Jan. 20, 2011.

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2043312,00.html

2.  What Can be Done to Better Support our Teachers?

Teachers are an essential element of our society and no educational reform that does not recognize the teacher as the most important factor beyond a student’s own desire to learn will be effective.  High performing schools recognize this:

“You see so many teaching techniques that you can apply to your own classroom,” he remarks. Education experts will tell you that of all the things that go into improving a school, nothing — not class size, not technology, not length of the school day — pays off more than giving teachers the time for peer review and constructive feedback, exposure to the best teaching and time to deepen their knowledge of what they’re teaching.”

Friedman, Thomas.“The Shanghai Secret.” New York Times. Oct 22, 2013.

...

"Nothing - pays off more than giving teachers the time for peer review and constructive feedback, exposure to the best teaching and time to deepen their knowledge of what they’re teaching.”  

What NOT to Do:

The problem is that many of the reform measures, beyond what has already been delineated above are built on a faulty set of premises that appear to suggest that:

We should treat teaching as a mechanical process.  If we identify all the standards, show teachers how we want the standards taught, test students on these standards and then evaluate the teacher’s effectiveness by how well the students performed on the test, we will have an effective educational model. 

We should treat schools like a business, where we can use a return on investment (ROI) model.  We can improve teacher effectiveness and student learning by using external motivators such as “pay for performance”, or by punitive measures, such as comparing teachers against one another, publishing test scores of competing faculty, or the abolishment of teacher tenure where teachers have to vie for their teaching positions based upon their yearly evaluations.

What We SHOULD Be Doing:

In response to these assumptions I would submit the following suggestions to support teachers and teaching:

We Should Treat Teaching as a Creative Process 
not a Mechanical One.    

      What the standards and common core people fail to recognize is that teaching is a creative process, not a mechanical one. Master teachers have the innate ability to deal with an unrealistic and dynamic set of variables in a classroom to affect real learning in an almost superhuman way.

Recognize what the Standardization Movement's 
End Game is and Thwart all Efforts to 
De-professionalize Education.   

The end result of the standardization movement is nothing less than the de-professionalization of teaching and teachers.  Somehow the thought persists that there is some secret formula that we just haven't found yet. If we treat education like a mechanical process and just get the recipe right, create the proper script, anyone can teach and all students will learn. The simple fact is that teaching cannot be distilled into a formula that once identified, anyone can do.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html

YouTube video:  “Ken Robinson:  How to escape education’s Death Valley.” TED Talks Education. May 2013.

Some people can't seem to get away from this idea that education can be treated like a business and there needs to be ROI model. The problem is you can't improve education without allowing teachers to be creative and do what they do best, and not everyone can teach (as we all know only too well). 

The business model which is used to incentivize performance doesn’t even work in today’s businesses, much less in education.  As more and more companies are coming to understand, extrinsic motivators are not appropriate in 21^st century problem solving - there are just too many variables.  The more complex a task is, the less effective performance incentives become, and in some cases, there is actually a negative corollary.  

 “The more complex a task is, the less effective performance incentives become, and in some cases, there is actually a negative corollary.  This is one of the most robust findings in social sciences, and also, one of the most ignored.” Pink, (2013).

The problem solving of today calls for divergent thinking, thinking on the fringes and in places that are not obvious.  Answers to today’s problems are not found in expected forms and places, and they are actually quite surprising in their origins when viewed in hindsight.   

Simply put, incentivizing work causes workers to focus. Focus causes a narrowing of thought and of possible solutions to a problem and does not provide for the breadth of solutions needed for today’s workplace. It is for these very reasons that Apple, Google, and many other tech giants have abandoned this outdated corporate model.

Motivation research is showing that intrinsic motivation is by far the most powerful, this is because they contain three key elements: Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose.

Autonomy is the natural human desire to direct our lives.  Every human craves this opportunity and to the extent that they have autonomy will determine how happy they are.

Mastery is the human desire to become really good at something that adds value to society.

Purpose is the human yearning to be a part of something that is larger than yourself.  Helping others, building community, and solving problems.

Successful companies are learning that to create an affective, highly motivated workforce, each of these elements must be cultivated and given opportunity to develop fully.  What is perhaps not so well recognized is that the elements of Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose are perfect job descriptors of the teaching profession in its truest state.  To the extent that any reform measures impact on these elements is severely damaging to the teaching profession.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

YouTube video:  Pink, Daniel:  “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.”

Many administrators don't understand a simple concept: Creating an environment where teachers thrive creates an environment where students thrive. Best performing schools/districts have largely abandoned the performance review process. Once a teacher has demonstrated teaching mastery and is highly qualified, effective administrators largely leave them alone to teach and these teachers don't have to continually prove their worthiness year after year. This leaves administrators and master teachers free to support struggling teachers.

Creating an environment where teachers thrive creates an environment where students thrive.

“Shen Jun, Qiangwei’s principal, who has overseen its transformation in a decade from a low-performing to a high-performing school — even though 40 percent of her students are children of poorly educated migrant workers — says her teachers spend about 70 percent of each week teaching and 30 percent developing teaching skills and lesson planning. That is far higher than in a typical American school.” (Friedman, New York Times, Oct 22, 2013).

3.  What challenges do our teachers face implementing STEM?

“The STEM crisis has not occurred despite our best efforts in teaching math and science, it has occurred 
precisely because of it.”

When we continue to teach math and science skills in isolation it is just like learning a skill with no application. We must abandon the academic model of instruction in favor of more problem based contextual learning.  Simply put, there must be more emphasis on context and less emphasis of content for content's sake.

Students must learn and be introduced to material contextually. Contextual learning provides the best opportunity for our students to connect their skills with real world application and utility.  Our students are very familiar with this process as they continuously access information using their smart phones.  They do so by selecting, downloading and testing applications based upon their utility.  If an application does not have sufficient utility, the user deletes it in favor of a more effective app.  It is evident that our students are essentially doing the very same thing when we teach them academic skills in isolation.  By providing content without necessary context, students are not retaining academic skills notwithstanding our best intentions...  students are essentially"deleting the app" as soon as they can because it has no utility in their life.   

 

“Some educational theorists speculate that the reason most people forget their math lessons quickly is because they learn math in a single abstract medium.” 

(Lipson and Kurman. Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. 2013).

The 'T' and 'E' of STEM that is, the technology and engineering pieces, provides the context of learning math and science concepts.  Unfortunately when you look at many of the STEM models often what you see is more of the same - we call the delivery STEM but it is essentially the same academic package with just a different name.  In nothing is this more evident than the way districts attempt to address the technology piece of the STEM equation.  The technology piece simply cannot be satisfied by having students use iPads or laptops instead of textbooks - that is educational technology and not STEM Technology.

Technology and engineering are not just just additional subjects to be added to the academic mix, they are integrated members of the strategy - they are the context.  Technologies are the products of engineering design activity.  It goes without saying that if a STEM strategy is not making the requirement that students design, iterate, and create technologies as part of their program of study, they are simply not engaging in STEM.  

The biggest difficulty that I can see with enacting STEM Education programs is that many  professional teachers don't know how engineering skills are used in industry so they can’t relate them to their students or deploy them properly as part of an effective STEM strategy.

 The dirty little secret of an effective STEM program is that STEM Education is really an euphemism for WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT.  Teaching our students necessary workplace skills, integrated, applied, and contextual, just as they are used in the real world, is the greatest possible outcome of the STEM Movement.

The fact that very few educators understand the engineering discipline and how to incorporate it into their instruction is a huge barrier to success because the Next Generation Science Standards mandate it:  "The next-generation science standards call for making science and engineering equal, but there are no science teachers today trained to teach science and engineering and, even more importantly, there are no professors of science education prepared to train teachers to teach science and engineering,"

“Lab school brings manufacturing technologies to middle-school classrooms.”
 

National Science Foundation Press Release 13-184. Oct 29, 2013.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=129472&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

There are very successful models across the nation that integrate academic instruction with an engineering CTE program to create effective STEM instruction. Such programs replicate engineering design activity through the use of project based learning (PBL) which naturally integrate STEM subjects: “...the STEM PBL challenges provide students with authentic real-world problems captured and re-enacted in a multi-media format designed to emulate the real-world context in which the problems were encountered and solved.” (Massa, DeLaura, Dischino, Donnelly, Hanes, 2012).


Anytime a teacher makes a requirement for students to learn, collaborate, or produce a project using the appropriate technology, they leverage the learning gains by not only providing learning content in a compelling way, but in the context of how it is used in the world. As we do this, we provide our students with the skill set for tomorrow’s workplace. That is the true charge of the STEM movement.