February 2009 Archives

PA Secretary of Education, Dr. Jerry Zahorchak, introduced Daniel, sharing a few notes on Pennsylvania's progress and plans for the future.  He noted that, even in these tough times, Governor Rendell has managed to sustain a high level of educational funding, including $20 million for the Classrooms for the Future program.  

Daniel Pink began by noting that he is an outsider, not an expert on education, and noted that "education as preparation for the workforce" tends to dominate the conversation on education.  

His major premise is that the requirements for success in the future are changing.  He uses the brain as a metaphor.  He says that our brains are elegant and specialized.  He described the left brain / right brain differences.  He said that the left brain is about analysis and the right brain is about synthesis, and that in the past the main attributes that were valued were left brain abilities.  While these left brain abilities are still required, ("absolutely positively indispensable") they are "necessary but not sufficient" for success in the future.  Artistry, empathy, and the big picture are now also crucial.

Pink described himself as a left-brain dominated guy, who loves numbers, charts, graphs, etc., but he feels that big changes are underway.  He laid out a cause/effect argument.  He says that the shift has three causes: Asia, Automation, and Abundance.  "Off-shoring" has been overhyped in the short run, he believes, but is understated for the long haul.  At the moment, India has an advantage, in that their salaries are low and they have a billion people.  The top 15% of India's workforce is larger than our entire workforce.  Next year the world's largest English speaking population will be in India.  And, there is now approximately no cost to communicate with them, a fact that enables workflow.  This makes the work that is "routine" (work that can be sent to the cheapest cost provider) vulnerable to off-shoring.  Unfortunately, this routine work (work that has a process and a right answer) is what we were advised to seek and trained to do.  The left hemisphere, Pink proposes, gets offshored or automated.  

Automation:  Machines are relapcing our muscle.  Pink used as other examples jobs that don't require muscle that can be automated, and described and displayed web-based systems for getting divorces and doing taxes.  

Abundance:  We are going through a tough period right now, but there is still abundance, also described as "material prosperity," and that is not likely to end.  He used the growth in the presence of refrigerators and TV sets as examples.  (There are now more TVs than people in the typical American home.)  He also talked about the proliferation of cell phones, and reported that today's cell phone contains more computing power than existed in our grandparents' time.  He used iPods as another example, asking how many people had them (almost all) and then how many people knew they were missing one eight years ago.  

To make it today, Pink proposes, our students' futures are determined by 3 questions:

He proposed that the jobs we should be preparing for should be high tech, high concept, and/or high touch, and lamented that the business world is about novelty, nuance, customization, while school is about routines, right answers, and standardization.

According to Pink, the six abilities that matter most are:

Pink offered five ideas about Education, or "How to prepare students for their future, not our past." 

(a slogan I picked up about 20 years ago from a Superintendent from the Pittsburgh area, Sam Sava.)

1.  Experiment with new metrics -- What gets measured gets done.  We need to develop metrics for right brain attributes, and highlight the limitations of left brain metrics.  He mentioned the Rainbow Project - Robert Sternberg -- an alternative SAT -- funded in part by the College Board, that asks very different questions than a typical test.  For example, it will give them a title and ask them to write a story, or give them a cartoon and ask students to develop a caption.  Or, it might ask them for ideas on how to get friends to help them move furniture.  He cited another example, the JSPE -- JEfferson Scale of Physician's Empathy.  The scores on that scale correlate better with patient outcomes than other predictors of success in medicine, including measures of content knowledge.

2.  Get real about STEM -- Pink proposes that we have a dangerously narrow view of what STEM subjects are all about.  They are not about right answers, but are about observation and asking the right questions.  He cited medical schools that are adding art education precisely as education is removing it, saying that we need "non-routine savants."  Creativity.  What does Creativity mean?  He described a tally of the responses of superintendents and employers.  Superintendents' top ability defining creativity was problem solving, while employers said it was problem identification.

3.  Tear down those walls -- The MVP (most valuable prefix) is "Multi."  We need people who can do a whole lot of things.  Listen to what the STEM world tell us:  Engineering employers said that they want engineers with passion, systems thinking, and ability to work in a multi-disciplinary environment and the ability to change.  (I missed a few other attributes, because I couldn't type fast enough.)

4. Infuse arts education throughout the curriculum -- It's not supplemental, it's fundamental. He said that the Chinese get this, and he cited an expert from China: "Creative arts are no longer a frivolous luxury, but are essential to achieving a competitive edge." 

5.  Promote and defend autonomy --  Educators have much less autonomy than most professionals, and students have too little as well.

He ended by thanking teachers, as the people who are going to move students into the future.

His remarks were very well received by the audience and the Secretary of Education.  Let's see if there are any longer-term effects!

"Students need to be able to write whatever they read."  If they read television, they need to be able to write television, etc.  You are not literate until you have command of the media collage.  Students need to write a lot in pursuit of developing great media collages. 

He says that Web 3.0 will be the "semantic web," in which what is returned by a search is a report, not a collection of separate items.  Much of the work of synthesis will have taken place before we see the response to a search.  

He predicts that writing will be more valuable than ever.  The ability to craft really good wrigint will go up in importance.  It will not be the end product, but it will be a crucial element in the path to the final product.  He teaches "visually differentiated text" (text with headings, boxes, etc., to make it more useful.  He proposes "Art" as the "4th R"  Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and aRt.  

He also says, "Attitude is THE aptitude," and encourages us to help students put things in perspective.  He feels that the goal must be fluency, not literacy, and he encourages us to "harness both report and story... embrace story."  Kids come to school wired for story.  At school they don't get stories, they get information in list-oriented formats.  Teachers need to take units and turn them back into stories.

A very impressive thing he does with students is "Green Screen Storytelling," in which he has students tell stories in front of a green screen (that he created by painting a wall of his classroom) and then produce art that is displayed behind them in dynamic presentations.  Wow!  A simple but powerful idea -- if the story is good.  He leaves the last 20% o the time, to the kids for tweaking and the technology side (leave the clicks and the tricks to the kids) and he concentrates on helping them tell the stories well.

As for assessment, he cares deeply that the teachers not be captivated by "anything that moves," but rather concentrate on helping students think about how well the product tells the story and moves the audience.  Assess the researching, the writing, the planning, the media fluency, and the literacy blending.  "Never yield executive producer status."

I would like to see this take root in Pennsylvania, and am willing to help teachers who want to make this happen with their students.  Contact me if you want to collaborate on this!

Jason Ohler speaks with passion, knows what he is talking about, and cares deeply about what he is doing and what we are doing as educators.  Watching his presentation was time well spent!!

In what I consider to be an excellent article titled "The Assessment Impasse" (Inside Higher Ed, February 5, 2009), Merilee Griffin describes a "longstanding pressure" that advocates of assessment for the purpose of accountability have placed on advocates of assessment for program and institutional improvement."  She points out that Arne Duncan, the new Secretary of Education relied heavily on standardized testing to drive the educational reforms in Chicago.  

All of that was interesting, but what she did that I really appreciated was turn our attention to the crux of the problem -- the fact that "when it comes to measuring learning outcomes in the higher cognitive skills, we literally don't know what we are talking about."  She points out that in assessment, the first step is to define what it is that students are to learn, but although we can agree that critical thinking and other higher order skills are important, we have not yet come to agreement on what these 

labels mean, and what students would be able to do if they had developed different levels of proficiency.  Amen.

That's a critical thing to understand if we are ever going to get started in making progress in this area, and if we don't take that step, education will continue to be driven by standardized tests and other assessments covering domains we have come to understand.  Ms. Griffin, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University, makes a series of seven recommendations for how we should go about the work of defining 21st Century Skills, and I applaud her for getting that conversation started with what seems to be a plausible set of recommendations.  

Let's see if these ideas can get a little traction as we begin a new era of American education!  Count me in.  Thanks for your contribution, Merilee.

Among other interesting evidence, the article cites an as yet unpublished study in which, "Adult subjects ... answered comprehension questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Examinations before and just after the presidential election.  The black participants who were tested before the vote performed worse than whites; those tested immediately afterward scored almost as well as whites."  I look forward to that study's publication, and to other evidence of the importance of self concept and academic performance.

In the meantime, one of several questions this raises for me is...

Your thoughts on this are welcome.

A recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled, "Are Schools Inflating Grades?  Marks from Teachers, Tests Vary Widely" has documented the problem well. 

I would love to hear from you after you've read the article, to see if you are willing to defend course grading or whether you think that there should be common tests used in courses offered across the nation that should be used to determine grades.

Or, if you want to come out against grading students in general, that's fine, too.  (I feel that grading is perhaps best used on "finished products" like eggs and meat, and that we should probably just track and report students capabilities without attaching a "grade" to such descriptions.)  What do you think?