When Is Personalized Learning Not Personalized Learning

Personalized Learning is a hot new brand in education, the Great New Thing that is going to revitalize education and elevate students to new levels of awesome. And yet, what is being pitched in many school districts is not personalized learning at all.

When we hear the words "personalized learning," we imagine an educational plan crafted to the individual student. Pat really loves dinosaurs, so the teacher creates a reading unit based on books about dinosaurs combined with a writing unit involving research about dinosaurs. If Pat is weak on particular styles of charts and graphs, Pat may get an extra unit that works on organizing information about dinosaurs visually. Meanwhile, Chris needs remedial work on reading, so Chris gets some lower-reading level high-interest materials about rodeos and horses, because that's what Chris loves. On the other side of the hall, Sam wants to be a concert pianist, so Sam's educational program approaches history from the perspective of the history of music, and Sam actually spends less time daily on science so that there's more time for music-related studies.

That, or something like it, would be personalized learning.

But what many school districts are actually talking about is personalized pacing. Chris, Pat and Sam all complete exactly the same reading materials, they study the exact same units in math, and they study history out of exactly the same textbook. The only difference is the speed with which they move through the materials. Chris is weak in reading, so Chris takes three tries to successfully complete the Unit 2 test, while Pat and Sam continue to Unit 3. Pat has trouble with volume problems in math class, so while Chris and Sam move ahead, Pat gets some supplemental materials (aka extra practice) with volume problems. There is nothing personal about their learning program except the speed with which they move through it.

This is not a new idea in education. If you're of a Certain Age, you may remember the SRA reading program-- a box of colored cards, each with a short reading selection and some questions to answer. Finish one card, move on to the next. That was personalized pacing. What's new today is (what else) having a computer do the job of deciding what Chris, Pat and Sam are supposed to do next. This does not require any advanced Artificial Intelligence. A series of relatively simple algorithms can handle it ("If the student gets all ten questions on Worksheet 23/b2 correct, move the student on to Worksheet 24/b1, but if the student misses questions 2, 4 and 7, move the student to Worksheet 23/b5.") The computer can move every student smoothly through the large, highly standardized flow chart.

It is, in many ways, the opposite of standardization. Its promise is that one size really can fit all if you just build enough flexibility into it.

Personalized pacing has value, but adapting it for the classroom brings up the age-old tension in education-- we have a certain amount of work to do, and only a certain amount of time in which to do it. What happens if Chris is six units behind Pat at the end of the semester, or the year, or the twelve years of public education? It's the oldest problem in education, and personalized pacing does not help solve it.

Personalized pacing also runs the risk of reducing education to a checklist of items to complete, leading some students to focus on gaming the system so that they can power through the checklist as quickly as possible.

Additionally, by computerizing the chore of organizing this personalized pacing system, we add the problem of pleasing the program. A teacher has dozens of ways to determine of a student understands the material or grasps the skill; a computer program generally has just one. Every teacher working with these sorts of programs recognizes the student complaint-- "I know the answer, but I can't figure out how the computer wants me to say it."

Despite its pitfalls, personalized pacing can have great value, and teachers have employed it since the first school room was set up. It is not new, and it is not personalized learning. Watch out for people who want to reinvent the wheel and then tell you that if you buy their newly reinvented wheels, your car will fly.

Originally posted at Forbes.    

The Factory, The Computer, and the Marketing Problem

Nancy Flanagan notes her frustration this week with the continued complaints about public schools, about how they are an outmoded factory model producing students on an assembly line. And she correctly notes where that comes from, and where it's headed.

Public school has been under the most modern wave of attack since 1983's A Nation at Risk, with each new wave of reformsterism accompanied by renewed attacks on one of America's oldest institutions. And the criticism has always served a purpose for Reformsters. So when we hear a new shift in that same-old song, we need to pay attention-- something is coming.

"Teachers are the most important factor is student learning" and "Many teachers are terrible" paved the way for test-centered accountability that was supposed to let us root out all the Terrible Teachers and fire the lot of them.

"Fifty states are higgledy piggledy in what and when they teach" and "We need to be able to compare students from Idaho and Florida" paved the path for Common Core State [sic] Standards.

"Students are trapped in failing zip codes" and "rich people get to choose schools" and even "Freeeeeedom!" were to pave the way for unfettered charter schools and vouchers.

It's basic marketing. You need your product to fill a need, and if the need is slight, you expand it. If there is no need obviously begging to be filled, you create it. And whatever the need is, you frame it in a way that suggests your solution is the best one for the job.

So what's the current pitch? Well, we've been subjected to the observation that schools haven't changed in 100, 125, or 200 years (including pronouncements from the Department of Education). We see the traditional model referred to as a factory or assembly line. We even see criticism of the previously-beloved Big Standardized Test. For the last two decades, we've heard about how the BS Tests were our defense against everything bad in education, but now, within the last year, we see widespread agreement that they have added to the factory-esque student-smothering atmosphere of schools.

Meanwhile, out in the investment world, we have bulletins like this one:

Classroom Management Systems Market research report 2017 delivers a holistic vision of the global market also analyze the current industry state, demands, and the business strategies implemented by market players.

“About Classroom Management Systems,The classroom management systems market is significantly fragmented due to the presence of several international and regional players. Players in this classroom monitoring software market offer focus on differentiating their products mainly in terms of deployment and features. The increasing need for offering personalized learning experiences and the rising awareness will offer significant growth opportunities for players in this marketspace. The classroom management systems can be segmented into on-premise deployment and cloud-based deployment. Cloud-based classroom management systems market segment will account for the major share of the classroom monitoring software market by the end of the forecast period. Cloud-based deployment model enables students, teachers, and administrators to access the data anytime and from anywhere.”

The CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) is reported at a breathless 24.71%. Computer software used to run a classroom is being touted as a tremendous and wonderful investment.

Meanwhile, competency based education teamed up with personalized [sic] learning is the Next Big Thing. My google alerts send me a handful of items touting the awesomeness of personalized [sic] learning every day. Along with the occasional article mentioning how cool it would be to do away with grade levels.

Free your child from the tyranny of the 100-year-old factory school assembly line!

Why do this? Because the folks pushing Total Immersion Ed Tech Mass Customized Algorithm Driven Personalized [sic] Competency Proficiency Based Learning Stuff (incidentally, I don't think it's a mistake that this stuff doesn't have a clearly stated brand name-- one lesson of Common Core was that if you give a program a clear brand name, you make it easier for critics to attack it) have a problem. Several, actually.

First, they aren't pushing anything new. Mastery Learning is rooted in the 1920s, pushed in the 1960s, resurrected as Outcome Based Education in the 1990s. Education that is responsive to and aimed at the individual child is built into the dna of public ed; every teacher in the country already does it to some extent. They haven't even reinvented the wheel; they've just pulled old wheels, some broken and not actually round, out of the warehouse and repackaged them.

Second, some of their ideas have a bad track record. It's not like there haven't many attempts to have a software-directed personalized [sic] learning school. Rocketship Academies were going to change education-- by putting every student in a cubicle with a computer. It didn't go all that well. Summit, the Zuckerberg-backed competency based algorithm-based ed program has seen some pushback, generally from parents and students who object to sitting at a screen while not actually being taught. Therefor...

Third, they can't lean into the major feature of their idea. Promoters of personalized [sic] learning have learned to emphasize the warm fuzzy individualized part of their pitch and gloss over the technology as much as possible- and to call it "technology". The only phrase with less education marketing power than "We're going to teach your child the Common Core" is "Your child is going to be taught the Common Core by a computer."

So the rhetoric of reform has moved past "we need better teachers" or "we need a choice of schools" into "we need to blow up the schools and replace them with individualized mass customized programs." And a key part of that pitch is to keep conjuring up visions of students crammed into rows of desks in sterile classrooms, faceless children strapped onto an assembly line. Because children trapped on an assembly line are so much worse than children trapped in front of a cold computer screen.

My recommendation to teachers and schools across the US-- start publicizing, through whatever media avenues (social and otherwise) available to you, images of your classrooms, so that the public absorbs the images of the vibrant, differentiated, warm and very human classrooms across this country and stops imagining that schools are some sort of dim Dickensian hell holes. And if your classroom is a Dickensian hell hole, I suggest you make it clear that no amount of computer technology or mass customized software will make up for mold and drafty windows and crumbling walls, and that the taxpayers should think about what they really want to spend money on.

Killing the Five Paragraph Essay: A Book About Writing

I'm happy to have sitting on my desk a fresh new copy of John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities officially out next week. For anyone who teaches writing, or who just wants to understand how we entered this golden age of bad writing instruction, and who also wants to know how to escape it.

Warner is a regular blogger for Inside Higher Education, and he turns up in a variety of other settings as well as having spent a couple of decades teaching writing on the college level. He knows the territory.

He's also heard the complaints about Kids These Days and how they can't write, and with the first few pages, he dispenses with the usual suspects (bunch of snowflakes with too many cell phones). So what's the answer?

The short answer is they write badly because we taught them to. The long answer takes up the first ten chapters of Warner's invaluable book.

We need to acknowledge first that we have always been complaining that students could not write, while also acknowledging that writing, unlike speaking, is a completely unnatural process that humans have to learn. Warner lays some important groundwork in talking about the writer's practice.

But the particularly valuable chapters are those that lay out the different influences that have created a perfect storm of bad writing instruction. Over those seven chapters, Warner helps clarify how these disparate yet interlocking forces brought us to this place. This sad, lumpy place.

Warner runs through seven problems. There's the problem of atmosphere, the way in which schools and a culture of pressure and competition can suck the fun out of learning. There is the problem of surveillance, the ways in which we monitor students closely, often choosing bad proxies in place of more authentic indicators (e.g. attention). The problem of assessment and standardization, the belief in the One Right Answer, which is the very opposite of good writing. The problem of education fads, like grit (here Warner includes a great breakdown of The Hype Cycle). The problem of technology hype-- no, the good writing assessment software that is always "almost here" still has not arrived. The problem of folklore, the received wisdom that is passed along with no evidence but age. And the problem of precarity, which speaks to the lack of stability in a teachers' life, including precarious pay and increasingly senseless and unpredictable means of evaluating the teachers' work.

You may not have thought of all of these as factors in the teaching of writing, but Warner makes a clear case for each. Then he talks about a better framework (my favorite chapter title here: "Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing") and wraps the book up with unanswered questions, those challenges that must be addressed.

This is a great book, clear and concise and accessible. It looks at the big picture of how we got to this place and how to get out of it, which is critical. Writing texts that focus simply on specific techniques and exercises invariably end up tinkering around the edges, because too many teachers are starting from a fundamentally flawed foundation. Not their fault-- it is a foundation that has been built and enforced by outside, non-teachery forces-- but before we can build a better structure, the foundation has to be addressed.

That is not to say that there aren't specific items from the "things you can use in your classroom next week" category, but the book is important for anyone who is interested in growing a world full of better writers, including people who aren't in the classroom. For more specific activities and exercises, I recommend Warner's The Writer's Practice, due in February of 2019.

This is a book we've needed for a while, and now that it's here I recommend you grab a copy.

ICYMI: Triptophan Hangover Edition (11/25)

Ready to just sit and spend some quiet time? Here's some worthwhile reading from the week. If it speaks to you, remember to share it, tweet it, or otherwise help push it out into the world. That's how voices get amplified.

Reading Too Soon

Need one more article explaining the science behind not teaching reading to littles? Here you go.

It's Time To End The Testing Culture In America's Schools

Robert Pondiscio ran this piece in the 74, so you might have missed it, but it's a pretty clear argument for chopping the Big Standardized Tests off at the knees.

DeVos Will Face House Dems on Five Ed Fronts

Politico tries to figure out which parts of the Democratic House will be making which kinds of attacks on which of the DeVosian policies.

Communications in a Modern World

Dad Gone Wild takes a look at how modern media have changed the rules for discussion, disagreement and debate.

The Teacher Life: Grading Papers Over Holiday Break   

Mercedes Schneider on one of those benefits that those damn only-work-part-of-a-year teachers enjoy.

Dear Lawmakers: Please Hire Real Teachers As Education Aides, Not TFA Alum  

Part of the purpose of Teach For America was always to create Reformsters who could claim teaching cred as a way to grease their passage into the halls of power (where they could advocate for reformster policies). It's working too well.

Rescuing Schools From Corporate Goliaths  

John Thompson reflects on some of the lessons of the last Network for Public Education conference.

Personalized Online Learning Fails  

Okay, I shortened the headline, but Nancy Bailey's piece ticks off the list of ways in which online learning does not serve students well and what they lose when they lose traditional classroom work.

Batch Processing Students On An Assembly Line  

Nancy Flanagan is wondering why we're back to complaining about factory model schooling again...

Charter Choice Closer Look  

A huge compendium of charter-choice related articles and items. Just in case this list didn't give you enough reading to do.

Navigating the Trivial in Writing Instruction  

Some big thoughts about the little things in writing instruction, from P. L. Thomas.

Toxic Philanthropy Part II  

Wrench in the Gears connects some more of the dots in the big-money fauxlanthropy game.

The Seven Most Powerful Words In Education

What can I do to help you?

These words are hugely powerful and tragically underused at every level of the education world.
In the classroom, teachers have been taught since the dawn of time that they should be clear about their expectations. This is excellent practice; let the student know exactly what you want from her. If she has trouble meeting that expectation, be certain that you are explaining the expectation clearly. And then ask the student, "What can I do to help you?"

It may well be that the student won't be able to tell you. That's okay. Just asking the question signals a shift in your classroom dynamic; instead of a setting in which the teacher demands performance from a student, who is on her own to produce the required signs of learning, the Seven Words reframe the classroom as a place where the teacher and student are teamed up to conquer learning obstacles together. Students benefit from knowing they aren't alone in the struggle, and teachers are reminded that students are their partners, not their obstacles (a view promoted from teacher accountability systems that say, "You have to get good scores out of your kids, or else.") It's worth noting that computerized personalized [sic] learning systems cannot ask this question in any meaningful way.

The Seven Words are also powerful for building administration. Sadly, may teachers have never, ever had a building principal ask the question. Instead they hear "Make your test numbers" or "Follow the proper procedures" or "Here's one more program I expect you to use in your class." There are plenty of expectations, but far too few building principals consider their job to include helping teachers meet those expectations. Some administrators pride themselves on an Open Door Policy ("Any teacher can come talk to me any time she wants") and some principals roam the building, popping into classrooms to see what's going on. But I'll bet there are few teachers in this country who have ever had a principal walk into their classroom, sit down, and say, "I just wanted to ask what I can do to help you with your work." Without something that explicit, some teachers will never believe it's okay for them to ask their boss for help with anything, ever.

The Seven Words would help at the policy level, too. We've been subjected to decades of school "reform," ongoing attempts to make schools better. And yet, as policy makers discuss various fixes and programs and policies, they rarely take the step of going to actual classroom teachers and asking, "What can we do to help you?" When teachers are allowed in the room at all, they are usually carefully handpicked teachers who will be friendly and agreeable.

Of course, the Seven Words are rarely used with teachers at the policy level because so many players at that level are there to sell something. They have decided on their own that No Child Left Behind or Common Core or Race to the Top or Competency Based Education or Any Amount of Ed Tech Whizbangery will fix things before they so much as look at an actual classroom teacher. But even after such policies are adopted, policy makers could say, "Okay, we've decided you're going to do this thing. What can we do to help you implement our idea successfully?" But even that escapes them. "Just expect real hard and throw some professional development at them. That should fix it." Even when things fail, few reformsters say, "Yeah, we really should have talked to teachers first." The diagnosis is invariably Bad Implementation or Insufficient PR or Not Enough Teacher Training.

The Seven Words have been all-too-often overlooked when imposing solutions on struggling schools. Charter operators and other school fix-em-up experts don't ask the question-- instead, they swoop in and announce, "We have decided what you folks need. Without talking to you. Because we're just that good, and you can't really be trusted to Know Things."

The failure of the Obama-Duncan School Improvement Grants and turnaround programs like New York's Renewal Schools all follow this same pattern. Top-down government officials declare, "This is what you're going to do to fix things." But nobody goes to the schools, sits down with teachers, and asks, "What can we do to help you?"

W. Edward Demmings believed that the answers to an organizations problems could be found closest to the place where the actual work was being done. The folks who have taken the reins of leadership in the education world would do well to remember his insight. But "What can I do to help you" doesn't just yield the most useful advice for helping schools; it breaks down the sense of isolation. Teachers are used to working in a solitary setting, and they're used to being ignored by people who make decisions that affect the classrooms where they do their actual work. Teachers are used to being over-extended jugglers who only see the bosses long enough for them to toss in one more ball (or cement block or running chain saw) and then run away.

We could improve the working conditions in schools and the morale of the teaching force, even as we uncovered some of the solutions to school improvement. It wouldn't be easy (for instance, some people would have to give up pet ideas that aren't actually helping anybody), but starting the process would be simple. We could do it with just seven words.

Originally posted at Forbes.

A Grateful Heart

It would be easy for me think that I Know Something.

My life is pretty good. And while there have been some rough patches, nothing bad has ever come into my life without my invitation. The bad patches in my life are my own damn fault, my own bad choices biting me in the rump.

So I could take credit for that. My professional success? My blinding teacher skills and professional acumen. My successful second marriage? I now know all the secrets of a good relationship. My lack of health problems? A well-lived healthy life style. Not being arrested, detained or physically abused by the authorities? I always behave according to the rules and do as I'm suppose to.

Americans (particularly white ones) are prone to a lack of gratitude which in turn hardens the heart and muffles empathy. Everything I have, the reasoning goes, I have because I earned it. I got what I deserve." From there it's not even half a step to looking at people who are having a hard time with the assumption that they, too, have gotten what they deserve. This is the world view at the steely heart of some conservatism-- some people are bad people who make bad decisions, and bleeding heart liberals are trying to thwart the natural order of things by protecting these people from the natural consequences of their poor choices. Welfare programs are about undoing the poverty that some lowlifes have earned, and if they don't suffer for their bad choices, how will they ever learn to do better. Birth control and abortion are about slutty women avoiding the consequences of their nasty sex-loving ways. If immigrants were meant to be American, they would have been born here-- why try to undo what nature has done? The business world grows out of the natural moral code of the universe, based on the fundamental truth that people should get what they deserve-- and no more.

This is especially a trap for teachers, whose job come grading time can feel a lot like deciding what students deserve. It's crazy making, and it tricks us into sitting in judgment of students as human beings, which is no place to be. My deal with myself was always that I would not try to judge what they deserved, but only assess what they had actually done. It was not my job to sit as judge and jury, making sure they got what they deserved.

Well, nobody gets what they deserve. Use every man after his desert, says Hamlet, and who would escape whipping? I don't deserve a tenth of what I have gotten, and continue to get out of life. And one really doesn't have to look hard in today's world to see that there is no apparent correlation between moral uprightness and the acquisition of money and power. But many of us keep assuming that if someone is rich, they must also be wise and good and deserving (and when they offer to fix education, we should listen to them).

And yes, there are people who don't get what they deserve-- to be treated with respect, to be free from abuse, to live without being beaten down for no reason. Do they still receive some measure of grace? It's not for me to judge that, but it is for to ask if I should be helping by delivering some of that grace myself.

Thanksgiving weirdly reminds us of this problem. We've come to understand that the old story, filled with moral clarity and historical ignorance, doesn't hold up. But what instead? The Pilgrims and Puritans were no saints, but neither were the native Americans, and the whole ugly mess of European colonial history in North America is a reminder that looking for clear-cut heroes in history is a fool's game. We all, to greater and lesser degrees, suck, and we have always sucked, and getting into arguments about who sucked the worst can be terribly time wasting. On Thanksgiving, I prefer to recommit myself to a simple set of propositions:

1) I have received, and continue to receive, far more than I deserve...
2) Therefor, I must owe someone-- the world, God, fellow humans, somebody-- a great deal
3) Therefor, I had better get to work paying off my debt.

We are all diners enjoying a meal we can't afford at an expensive restaurant. We should be committed to washing a ton of dishes.

Our motto should be "there but for the grace of God go I." We should be grateful for what we have, and that thankful heart should be filled with the impulse to help others, to watch out for the people around us, to take care of our fellow travelers as best we can before we finally run out of time. I don't deserve what I've been given, but I can't send it back-- all I can do is pass it on. I can harden myself into a bitter person who worries each day if I got what I wanted, and what was keeping me from it, or I can ask each day if I did enough, gave enough, to pay today's installment on my debt. My privileges come with an obligation to do for other people. Life's challenge, of course, is to figure out what that means in practical, day to day terms. That is where love comes in, but this is enough heavy lifting for a food-based holiday.

Give Books

I was just going to add this to the ICYMI list, but it's too cool not give extra attention.

Adam Gish, an English teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle, took a hundred students on a different sort of field trip. He loaded them up on two big yellow school buses and took them to a book store. Each student had a $50 gift card. They got a tour of the store and time to spend the money on whatever books they chose.

Students had to write an essay to qualify for the trip, a program that has been growing bit by bit since the days that Gish discovered some students had never been in a book store before.

This might be one of the most awesome things ever.

I still remember the Scholastic book fairs in elementary school, and the sheer power and excitement of holding an actual real book in my hands, buying it with my own money and taking it home to sit in a corner and read. I remember how those books smelled, how the new pages had that special resistance to being opened until the binding was gently eased loose by the reader working his way through. I bought some of the books aimed at students my age, but I loved getting the "real" books-- I still have my copies of the H G Wells novels I bought from Scholastic.

When I taught middle school, I tried using the book club fliers, but the hassle of being a middle man for thirteen year old customers was daunting, and it wasn't quite the same (though when I opened those boxes of books that came, and that old smell wafted out, I was excited all over again). And when the twins were born, we enrolled them in Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, one of the most awesome pieces of real philanthropy that a celebrity ever undertook (the library sends a book a month to every small child who's enrolled-- you can read about it here).

Sure, I buy tons of otherwise unavailable books on line. But there is nothing like actually being in a bookstore, seeing them all lined up or laid out and looking through them, peeking to see what cool stuff awaits.

It has been years and years since we had a new bookstore in my area; we now have a used bookstore that gets some new stuff, and that's better than nothing. It's about 75 minutes to the nearest Barnes and Noble.

But to be able to put some students on a bus and hand them a gift card for buying books-- that would be awesome. My first thought was that I'd love to chip in, but Gish has an apparently generous anonymous donor, and this has to be a more common thing. For instance, if teachers in LA aren't taking students to the Last Bookstore, that's a crime. Book store field trips should be a thing everywhere. I would love to hear about similar programs in your area, and if you don't know of one, then I think you should get together with some other folks and start one. We all should. If you're looking for a good community project to round out the holiday season-- not just the gift of books (though the Icelandic tradition of Christmas Eve book gifts is also way cool)-- but the gift of getting to shop for and pick out a book of one's own. That seems like an excellent idea.