The other education

Yesterday, I saw the Providence AFTERZONE end-of-the-year celebration. There was an Aikido club, a soccer club, a few art and crafts groups, a noisy group of kids wearing monster masks, a guitar studio, a dance group, the Save the Bay, the natural history museum, and so many others – I cannot list them all. And of course, a few hundred kids were bussed in to showcase their work, and to play in the inflatable obstacle course. In education, I am more impressed by things that appear normal, by the phenomena that feels “as things should be.” Let me call this the sense of elated normality. We all have a sense of good life in us, a certain instinct to recognize when things go right. But there is a narrower subset of the same sense as applied to the world of childhood and learning; you know a good educational experience when you see it.

Coincidentally, I am trying to work on a paper for a new journal called Other Education that is going to cover forms of education outside traditional schooling. This made me think about a profound damage to American education that was done and is continued to be done by the Back-to-basics thinking. In business, if you want to improve the quality and efficiency, you concentrate on your core production process, and let go of all extraneous things. Well, this is not exactly true even for business, but alas education was influenced not by real business people, but by business gurus. So the thinking went – if you want kids to learn more math, then spend more time and money on learning math, and less time on fluff like dance groups and a bead jewelry clubs. And while we are at it, let’s also cut recess to only a few minutes, and oh, let the junior high band go, too, for it is very expensive and we have another round of cuts.

But this is not how education works. If you are after the core skills such as literacy and numeracy, the road to them is indirect. For certain developmental reasons, it is especially so in the middle school. The road goes through relationships. You need first to latch on children’s interests, then build a relationship with students, and only then can you ask – oh, why don’t we also learn some algebra. One of the core problem affecting education is, unfortunately, the democracy itself. Most educational professionals will recognize the need for afterschool and summer programming immediately. If you want to be a hard-nosed pragmatic, you need to see the “fluff” as the educational infrastructure and the hard skills as a product. Unfortunately, the lay boards and politicians that run education in this country find that reasoning hard to understand. I have to admit that even within our profession, some people with experiences limited to just schools and classrooms do not understand it either. Hence the generation of partially blind educational reformers hammering away at accountability solutions.

An economic analogy would be this: you can invest all you want in food production, but if you don’t have any roads to get food from growers to consumers, you cause both food shortages and waste. In education, the path through children’s interests to relations IS the only road to deliver learning to them. We neglect, defund, and actively destroy the road, and pump all resources we can muster into the production. But if children or their minds are not in the classroom, they won’t learn no matter how hard the teacher tries and how skillful she or he is.

This is why I experienced the sense of elated normality yesterday. Our state has one of the most innovative and organized afterschool communities in the country, and this is one achievement we can be proud of. PASA wants to sign every middle-schooler in the city who wants it to a Summer day camp, for free. This is how things should be. This society absolutely can afford it, even if school budgets must be cut to do that.

Lost in transmission

What people tell you directly is always different from how others would relate that message. Any important and somewhat complex message you receive indirectly, through a third person, is bound to be incorrect. This is especially true when the subject matter is not neutral, when the conveyer has an agenda or an interest, or is under stress. Basically, one should never completely believe anyone representing a third person’s opinion. With two people in between, I often cannot recognize my initial message if it comes back to me. Many times, people to whom I convey what someone told me they said have the same reaction. 

Why is this? - Certainly not because people lie. In fact, very few people lie. There are not many good natural liars, and the ability to lie flawlessly usually speaks of neurosis or mental problems. For a regular person, it is very difficult to lie effectively, and takes an enormous effort and incredible memory. Because information is shared so freely and so often, a deliberate lie will come to surface, with embarrassing consequences. We all know that.

Nor do people often misrepresent other’s words intentionally. This happens more often than direct lies, but it still cannot account for the amount of errors in transmission. But any informational transaction involves an act of interpretation. And that act is not neutral to what we want, what we afraid of, and what we already know and believe. You will literally hear what you hear differently depending on who is speaking, and what opinion you have of the speaker. If you built a theory of the other person that deems his or her incompetent, and that person reports on a problem, you will automatically assume it is his or her own fault. If you do not trust the other person’s intentions, almost anything she or he says will be perceived - and transmitted to others – as deceitful or ill-intentioned.

It also depends on what you want from this interaction. For example, if you ask for a permission, and the answer is “no”, your mind will go into a process of looking for a ways of not hearing the “no,” and finding any possible “maybe’s.” Let it go for a while, and the subconscious mind will do the trick by literally re-arranging your memories of the conversation. And of course, the transmitter almost never says “no” in a way that leaves no room for interpretation. It would be impolite and offensive. So the room for more interpretation is always there.

The speakers are also attuned to what the receiver of the message hopes to hear. So we all edit our message just a little to please whoever is the listener right now. Therefore the same exact message conveyed to another person will sound slightly different. We have the instant editing machine in our brain that will alter our words an instance they leave the mouth.

There are many of these small corrections, which accumulate over the number of transmissions, and which actually become larger with the passage of time, as we rearrange and re-organize our memories. None of us can remember verbatim what the other person had said, so we need to re-tell the story in our own words; this very act introduces more errors. Thus a message “but this is the kind of reasoning the Nazi were using to justify their policies” becomes “oh, she compared you to the Nazi.”

We all need to avoid indirect transmissions of sensitive messages to the extent possible. “Why don’t you ask him?” or “It is better if she explains this to you” are phrases we should use more often. When in doubt, go to the source, and verify. And never act on a message you did not receive directly from the sender. “He said, she said” is a red alert cue. A n utterance that begins with one of these qualifiers can never be trusted for anything other than simple, factual messages. In conflict, always hear both or all sides directly. It is not easy to achieve, but there is little choice.

Blind leading the blind

One place where the “blind leading the blind” system works well is anonymous peer review. Introduced first in 1665 by Hendy Oldenburg, the editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, this remarkably successful invention advanced the quality of scholarship. It is partly responsible for the establishment of the scientific method and the rise of the European civilization. I know the Russian academic scene fairly well; it can boast both talent and ideas, but no true blind peer review process. This little deficiency has very large consequences. The Russian educational discourse is much more arbitrary, much more ego-driven than the English-speaking one. It takes much longer for good ideas to rise to the top; it breads corruption and discourages truthfulness. Both junk and good scholarship can be found both in Russia and in the West, of course, but I can assure you, the proportions are very different. The anonymous peer review provides a significant nudge, over time shaping the academic discourse. It has its drawbacks in the times of paradigm shifts, but no one argues that its overall effects are negative or insignificant.

When I review a paper, don’t know who wrote it, so I am not beholden to assumptions, biases, and expectations. The judgment is between me and the Truth. I never know if it is a he or she, a high school student or a distinguished silverback. When I was younger, peer review-inspired rejections seemed to me arbitrary and unfair (I did not feel that way about reviewers who liked my work). With age, I came to treasure those anonymous interactions, even when they end in rejection. When we do not know each other, the Truth can be indeed invited to the table. I don’t care if the author’s feelings get hurt, and won’t pay a price of souring relationships with him. We always lie and flatter those next to us because we are constantly working on reinforcing good relationships. Those seem more important than the abstract truth. We can only be truly honest with strangers. Honesty and friendship are incompatible, contrary to the naïve belief in the opposite. Relationships get in a way of being truthful – they have to! People with very deep connections (“real friends”) can sometimes afford to tell the truth on important matters, but it is rather an exception than the rule.

I have written about the need for blind peer review in teaching. As many of you know, some of us have been working on Syllabus, the first journal to publish peer-reviewed syllabi (hopefully, the first issue will appear in June). The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Why don’t we blindly review many more things - syllabi, assignments, tests, assessment instruments, rubrics, reports, tenure and promotion materials? We do need honest, unbiased, anonymous feedback from people we can trust.

In teaching, we need to know our students, their stories, their needs and strength to guide them. And yet we also need a moment of truth when someone who we know is competent, but also removed, dispassionate, and nameless, tells us how we both did. Did the student really learned what I hoped to teach her? Or am I projecting my own pride, my insecurities, and my own time investment onto him? I worked so hard, and poor thing, she worked so hard, - it just got to be an A. I would like to pass the ultimate judgment of his competence onto someone else – the next class’ instructor, a future employer, or an independent testing company. Does my involvement make me blind to her weaknesses? Of course, it does. We are biased because we are human. We cannot be trusted with evaluating our own work.

Nor do we compete with each other. For example, when a group of faculty redesigns curriculum, there is never a competing team whose final project may actually be selected, not yours. You are always, automatically producing the best work! You’re on the winning team from the start! is this healthy? Would a little competition make us a more creative, more demanding of each other, and less likely to succumb to groupthink? Private businesses are at least subjected to the discipline of the market – those who care too much about being nice to each other at the expense of truth – those will go belly up, eventually. But we are not in that world. What will compel us to tell the truth rather than always being nice to each other? We do need to think of a way to erect a barrier between our relationships and our professional judgment.

Prying into practice

My week began with a visit to Mike Convery, the Superintendent of Coventry Public Schools. His is one of the most interesting districts in the State, and here is what I learned this time. The district has developed a functioning RTI-based system they call SWAT: School Work Armed with Timer. I know, a silly acronym, but just wait to hear what this us. I also suspect the silly name is intentional – to bring the whole conversation about data use and RTI closer home somewhat.

Three released teachers (which they call the RTI PD coordinators) – go around schools and assess student progress three times a year. Each student may get up to 15 scores in different areas of reading, math, etc. This is already somewhat revolutionary, for assessment has always been in the hands of instructors. It always struck me as odd, because of the inherent conflict of interest. To my knowledge, only the Western Governors University and Coventry Public Schools have actually done something about it; not without a struggle. A software system called RTImDirect is fed the data, and it produces color-coded lists of students which identify the specific risks they may have. Then principals and teachers hold the grade-level data meetings (yes, they are in the contract!) where they figure out strategies to bring targeted children up to speed. Coventry is already a few years into the implementation of this, so the initial conversations about whether or not this whole thing is right or wrong are over. Mike says that the influence of targeted interventions is so obvious that it became completely undeniable. It took them a while from merely paying lip service to differentiated instruction to actually believing it can work.

My worry is how to insinuate our students into those conversations. How do we get our students into some of the best work that is being done in the State and outside? How can we teach them to be the teachers or tomorrow, not of yesterday? We do send students out to schools – a lot. Moreover, most programs try to select cooperating teachers carefully, including personality matching. On the other hand, there are not many places in the state where one can witness a mature conversation about formative assessment. We make so much emphasis on learning the craft and art of teaching that those other activities are relatively easy to miss. Teacher training is not about the quantity of field experiences. The game has now shifted into providing much focused, targeted field experiences, where we are sure students see exactly what we want them to see, and link it directly to what they have learned in class. It is also true about all education – the density of learning can and should be higher, not its extent. We all are used to use the length of learning (credit hour, contact hours) with its results. The assumption served us well for many years, but no longer does.

Consider practicalities. Coventry is 30 minutes away. SWAT days happen three times a year; the grade-level data meetings – more often, but still easy to miss. They will probably balk at 50 RIC students hanging around, even if we could bring them. And yet we need to be actively prying into practice – not all practice, the best practice, the still rare practice. Teaching changes faster than we can keep up with it. But our ultimate goal should be that our recent graduates can fit in quickly into any advanced district, and can become agents of change in any school that is behind. With all of our faculty experiences, in schools, it is very difficult to count on the past. Many us when we were classroom teachers have not experienced anything like the Coventry-style data conversations. None of us lived through the new teacher evaluation system. We rely heavily on cooperating teachers, who are in classrooms right now, but as I said, not all of them are working at a district where something cutting-edge is going on. Our students get a lot of wisdom, but not always skills needed tomorrow. It is just very difficult for us all to keep up with the field that is so dynamic, and I am not convinced it is a worthy goal. After all, we have different jobs,, and have to keep up with our own research literature. We’re not classroom teachers.

So we need to see the best kinds of practice. And I don’t mean just Coventry; this was more of an example. Many districts and schools are doing many other cool things I’d love our students to see, and I know we cannot replicate in-house. I’d love them all to get the Restorative Practices training by Julia Steiny. It would be fantastic to send them all to some of the best PASA youth groups. I would love every one of them to spend a day in Blackstone Valley or in the Learning Community charter schools. It would really be great to get our students through the series of PD that RIDE is rolling out throughout the State. What I would love the best is for us to have a way of collecting and sharing these kinds of gems, and a way for our students to access them.

If I had a lot of money, I would send a camera crew to film all the gems we can find; not the You-tube random stuff, but something we know and can weave back into our coursework. Or I wish a college instructor could flip a switch and see the actual SWAT process going on in real time, and then have a class of students ask questions – just for 15 minutes, so we’re not too intrusive. But this is not just a dream – we can do it now, with existing technologies. I have to admit, it is still fairly expensive on the human side – to have someone drive, film, edit; to have someone coordinate the schedules, talk to both parties. Then the gems should be incorporated into existing courses, work their way into assignments, earn points… I don’t have a good solution; this is just an invitation to discussion. How do we pry into practice, how do we look deeper than just field experiences?

The Sowing Season

This year is still winding down, with its ceremonies, with the Pomp and Circumstance, with faculty tired over grading, and red-eyed students storming the computer lab. It is the best time in our calendar, when we look at our graduates and think: - it was all worth it, every minute of it. We read their papers and think – at least sometimes – well, I did not waste my time on this one; look at how much she is grown. I keep coming back to the running list of our projects, and try to discern what we have learned; which ones failed and why, which ones worked, and why. My mind wonders into the next year immediately. What can be realistically achieved? What should we push for, even though the chances are not clear? Remember, in certain kinds of work learning from it is more important than whether the actual goal is accomplished. And finally, what do we absolutely have to clean up, resolve, and get over with? I started to build another list for the next year; this time a little more manageable (people complained that the 11/12 list was hard to navigate; it is absolutely correct). Of course, I always invite others to contribute, knowing perfectly well this is the worst of time for most faculty and chairs to help out. Their seasons are not exactly like mine.

I love this part of my job – planning, imagining, and trying to see the future. And yes, I know I have written about it last August; called it the planting season. Oh, well, how unoriginal, repeating myself. But in August I was worried about the risks; this time I am reflecting on the joys of planning, so there.

The big picture is fairly clear. In the next year, we need to continue reshaping our programs to make them more competitive, more unique, and more applicable. We will keep pushing off-campus offerings, and perhaps investigate hybrid or online programs. To do that, we must continue to innovate – small and big. We should find ways of expanding our various partnerships throughout the state. Another big goal for us is to improve the quality of experiences for our students, staff and faculty. So, those are the goals – it is fairly simple to come up with them. Now, what specific, manageable projects can we turn them into? Who is going to do them? How and when things should be moving? Who can watch over them, help and nudge, ask and offer help? That’s the puzzle we will be playing in this office over the summer. We also need t allow for contingencies, for something unexpected – good or bad – to happen. So some reserve capacity should be around, and that does not mean “OK, I can do this over the weekend.” It is especially interesting to find synergies – ways in which separate projects can sometimes benefit each other.

But in a way, each of us should do something like that. Every faculty member should have a realistic plan. These are things I will be doing, and these are things I am going to say “No” to. The nature of contemporary work changes –from just doing it, it shifts more and more to thinking about how, when, and with whom to do it. So we start with a common template, which should also have the right links. Do you want to try to help ? If many people contribute just a little bit, we all gain something.

The Hunger Games

The movie reminds us how much of Rome is still with us. Not a great film by any means, the anti-utopia it shows is oddly plausible. Why? – Because we recognize all of those elements in our own society: clever technology that fails to feed all, the entertainment industry edging on gladiatorial games, the warehousing of the poor. Romans have shown how cultural sophistication can live along with barbarism and how the rule of law can exist alongside cruelty. The only thing that prevents us sliding into the world of the hunger games is the thin layer of ideas: liberalism, democracy, human dignity. There is nothing hard, or objective, or economic about them; all fragile, all living in our imagination only. This is how anti-utopias work: they show us where we do not want to go, and force us think how to avoid getting there.

As I watch the great American political theater playing its presidential show, I wonder why it does not include more conversation about the big ideas and ideals. After all, if a Hollywood blockbuster can make us think about the future, why not people running for the highest office? All arguments and counterarguments are fairly predictable, and none are terribly complex. The only element of drama is in unexpected twists of human behavior – a scandal, an error, a gaffe. It is a pity, for people involved in it certainly have original thoughts. I remember how Clinton was forced to dumb down his speeches in his first election. All of the presidents sound more intelligent once they leave the office, even George Bush, Jr. Obama and Romney both play it safe, sticking to proven rhetorical cliché’s, and taking shots at each other whenever the opponent deviates from the script. Thus the mutually enforced discipline of blandness rules. Aren’t we all afraid to say something stupid a little too much?

I wonder if we could have them watch a movie, for example the Hunger Games, and comment on it. Or should they have a debate on the Federalist Papers? How about a discussion on the constitutionality of the health care law? Basically, I want to know what they think about the future past November 2012.

Playing an expert

We used to administer the technology test to our students. It was a good test, especially when it was designed some 15 years ago. Our students still do need to know how to create new files, save files, format in Word, calculate simple formulas in Excel, etc. Most come to us with this knowledge, but some do not. How do we catch them and help to gain these basic skills? That was the logic behind the test. Unfortunately, it is expensive to administer, because we needed a full time faculty member to oversee and update it, a graduate assistant to run the tests. It was also very hard to keep track of compliance, and it was very inconvenient for students. You can inconvenience students all you want, but only when they see the benefit, and learn something. In this case, as I said, most did not learn much. So, with heavy heart, I had to push for suspending it.

However, there is a different solution now. Just this morning I took an online test on Excel proficiency with a startup company called smarterer. It took me only about 20 minutes, and I have to say most questions were very good. According to them I am an Expert (not yet a Master) in Excel. And I can prove it to you, which is definitely better than a line in one’s resume– “I am proficient in Excel.” For our students, I believe the Familiar level would be enough, Proficient (below the Master) would be ideal. Note, the record can be linked to my Fb profile, put on a web site and is public. All I need to do is to put on my online resume Excel, Expert level, and send it to Feinstein School for admission. I can also pull a badge; anyone clicking on it will see the proof. The site also has tests on Word, basic math, PowerPoint English for Business, etc. I would argue we need to have all students take a test on Social Media, which tests one’s knowledge of Facebook, Twitter. It would cost us almost nothing, and monitoring compliance can be either fully automated or largely delegated to administrative assistants.

Then we could allocate resources in a more focused way, to those few students that actually need help, and cannot learn on their own. They would need to either get resources for self-study (tier-1 intervention), get tutoring help from OASIS or peers (tier-2 intervention), or take a class (tier-3 intervention). They should still pass the test in the end.

An interesting part of this site is crowd-sourcing. People who are proficient users get annoyed when the questions are just not right. Also, many people share an innate desire to share what they know with others. So once you become a master, you can comment on questions, edit questions, introduce your own questions, etc. You can build your own tests, and avoid the hassle of copying blackboard shelves. I must admit I wasted about 30 minutes playing with the Word test for that very reason. It is mildly addictive, which is how crowd sourcing works. It helps to solve a key issue: good assessments are very expensive to build, validate, and update.

Of course, this raises the question of cheating. We do not quite know who is taking the test – the student or a friend. However, if there are enough of these, red flags will come up with someone who cheats, and we can ask them to repeat the test in a proctored situation. Again, most students would not cheat, and suspecting everyone is a waste of resources. Cheating increases only when there is a single test with very high consequences.

This is how we can both improve the quality of preparation, and free up some time for more meaningful, more in-depth experiential learning. I am convinced every course can have some granular material that can be presented as a simple testing module, so we have more time for really in-depth discussion and collective inquiry.

The bronchitis diary

I was fighting bronchitis most of this and a part of the last week. With the right drugs, it is not a big deal. Like any other minor or major ailment, it does make you think about your own body. We all live so much through our minds that the illusion of independence from the body becomes strong. Until that it, something goes wrong and the mind runs back to the body like a little scared child to its parent, asking for help and protection, refusing to work, denouncing its own independence.

It is good for all of us to get sick once in a while. It makes us a little more compassionate to all those people who have much more serious conditions, sometimes life-threatening, sometimes painful and sometimes debilitating. It makes us remember that people’s minds are situated in their bodies, which may or may not be good hosts. We don’t see each other much anymore – a lot of business is conducted through email. What a great and efficient way of doing business! However, what we see less and less is when someone looks pale, or is limping, or is short of breath. We just don’t notice these things as much anymore, because you may become a message in my inbox. We communicate more, but see each other less.

Illness and getting older are key human conditions. We like to pretend to be forever young and immortal, but I dread the world where it actually becomes true. We are better off frail and sick, because the ability to feel pain, and be tired is what we all have in common. Once we lose that ability, we become something less. Love is inextricably related to pain and life - to death. Forgiveness is rooted in compassion, and compassion depends on the common biological limitations.

I guess codeine can also make one overly philosophical or pathetic. But I am over it now; thanks for asking. Now, how do you feel?

Badges, buckets, and bugles

The idea of the week is “badges.” This week, PASA has announced its "Pathways for Lifelong Learning" entry was named as a winner in the national competition Digital Media and Learning, sponsored by the MacArthur and Mozilla Foundations. (The other winners include Microsoft, NOAA, NASA, PBS, Department of Veteran Affairs, Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy, The Walt Disney – not too shabby a company!) Their work builds on a Mozilla project to create an open infrastructure for awarding badges. PASA will develop a program where students will earn digital badges, which in some cases will be converted in high school credits. The difference between a badge and a college credit (or a continuing education credit) is that to earn the former, one needs to demonstrate some specific skill, or show an accomplishment. While credit is basically the seat time, a badge is like a mini-certificate. It is similar to Boy and Girl Scout badges – you show you can play bugle, you get a bugling badge. Only now this can be done electronically, and one click will drill down and show which authority awarded the badge, and what was involved in demonstrating the skill or knowledge.

This idea finely completes our TEIL session last week. OK, basically the dilemma is this. To compete with low-cost quality online degrees, we should emphasize what we do better than they do. Namely, we need to provide our students with quality experiences and the quality relations with faculty and peers. Imagine something like a residency with either an Arts and Sciences professor, or a teacher preparation experiential learning community. But to do that well, we need to free up time and resources, and therefore we must cut something out. To do that, we must embrace our enemy, and borrow its weapons. In other words, we should shift some learning to on-line or self-paced modular kind of experience. That’s the paradox – to distinguish ourselves from them, we have no choice but become partially like them. It took us a while to realize, actually’ about two months.

The next thing we did was try to brainstorm how student knowledge could be put into two buckets – one that requires longer, intense interactions, and carefully constructed meaningful experience (the Experience Bucket), and the second that includes knowledge and skills that can be learned in a relative isolation, independently, perhaps on-line, or tested out of (we called this the Sacrificial Bucket, although we realize it is as important as that in the first bucket). We also realized that our version of the buckets is heavily biased towards pedagogy, because no FAS faculty were amongst us. Oh, well, but the idea still stands – you need to compress something in order to expand something else.

The next problem is that there is no open market of these modules, and we have very little means of distinguishing which ones are good, and which are not. It would take many millions of dollars to invest in building rigorous content and quality assessments. RIC alone simply does not have these kinds of resources, and neither does any other single institution. So, of course, when I heard about the badges idea, I realized that they can be used to fill our sacrificial bucket, because presumably, they will create a global market of those relatively narrow, although very important skills, which could be learned for free or at low cost. Interestingly, this is perhaps third or fourth time I hear about badges. The first few times I was just skeptical or laughing, like you’re laughing right now. Funny how when you don’t need it, it is trash, and when you do, it becomes treasure.

What I am saying, basically, that we have figured out the salvation plan for higher education. Yep, no less and no more. Many details are still vague, but I can imagine how we can gradually turn some of our courses into badges – fully or partially, and how we can eventually build high quality, life-changing experiences for our students; the experiences they absolutely cannot get anywhere else but here. This would be a great opportunity to re-think our curriculum in view of two buckets, and how they interact. The badge infrastructure is promising to be flexible and simple; it will allow to keep track of student progress (it may be even better than PeopleSoft), and to both create our own badges and borrow/buy someone else’s. We can also use the same badge for both our students and for teachers’ professional development (which some people from Providence Public Schools already indicated). They can signify both online or face to face learning, as long as there is a rigorous assessment or a convincing demonstration of a skill. A lesson plan writing badge, anyone? We already have a number of badges under different names: writing requirement, service learning requirement, health education workshops, licensure tests.

The low-cost high quality online degrees are probably between 5 to 10 years away. The New Charter University or the Western Governors, or someone else with enough money and brains will figure it out. There is no intrinsic limit to the model, even though most of the existing online degrees are still pretty poor. And once this happens, change can be sudden and catastrophic, for students will vote with their purses. Some colleges will capitalize on their prestige; others will learn how to provide unique experiences and communities, while still others will close their doors. I am convinced RIC should be in the second group. There is no choice, really.

Philosophy

It was Pittsburgh this year where the Philosophy of Education Society held its annual meeting; a beautiful city. I started to come in 1994 or 95, and missed maybe one or two. The Society was founded in 1942, and John Dewey used to be a member. This is where I get to be someone else entirely. Of course, my philosopher friends know I went to the Dark Side, and joke about it. But it is all the same to them – it is the merits of your argument that count, not seniority, or how many people on the program committee are your friends (in fact, it is harder). The Society is notorious for taking peer review very seriously. One of the former presidents complained that his papers were rarely accepted before and after he served as the President: “What kind of scholarly society routinely snubs its presidents?” I had a dry spell of perhaps 9 years where I sent something in every year without any luck. It is not enough to have a good idea, but one needs to develop the craft to develop a good argument. And once you get the craft down, you tend to run out of ideas. It is not easy to have both, and the truth is – whenever you sit down to write, you can never be sure that something worthy will come out. And this is how it should be. Of course, now we can “publish” anything at all – even the haphazard writing like in this blog. And because of that, we need places like my PES even more than before. Someone has to apply impassionate scrutiny to our thinking. We need a friend who understands but who is tough. Otherwise, the intellectual enterprise called scholarship disintegrates in the relentless play of ambition, vanity, and opinion.

Higher education is changing. Every week we hear about one or another potentially disruptive innovation. Teacher education that used to support philosophy of education is under pressure, and cannot support the field anymore. And it is understandable – we are asking the public to pay for us to think deeply about education, and yet no one outside the group can understand what the conversation is about. It is a great degree of trust we are asking for, providing that unlike biologists or engineers we cannot really demonstrate any tangible benefit to the society. Change is inevitable and may be profound. I just hope there will always be a PES conference, even if none of us get to be full time philosophers. Who cares, right? Socrates did not get a pay check from the Athenian state at all; he did get a free cup of hemlock to drink. A Russian geneticist organized a secret graduate school at a Moscow pharmacy when Stalin outlawed genetics. We can’t complain of being persecuted.

The Open College

We deal with a number of external players – partners, collaborators, competitors, regulators, employers of our graduates, sites for field placements, funders, advocacy groups, parents, etc. They all are fairly annoying: do not understand what we do, but think they know how to run our show. Most are unhappy with us, or have specific demands, expectations, and requests; the great majority of those are unrealistic and naive. And need I mention? – Not one of our partners understands research.

Yet when I look at which projects are moving fast, and which are stalled or moving slowly, a pattern emerges. We work much faster, and do a better job when an outside partner is involved in a significant way. Examples? - The four new courses were developed within one week, because we were trying to beat the deadline on a project with TFA. The Youth Development degree and Youth Services certificate were developed within just a few months, because of our collaboration with the afterschool community. The Early Childhood degree major revision received a tremendous boost from both the program’s advisory board, and from our working with Ready to Learn Providence. The School Advisory Board has proven to be an extremely effective think tank that generated numerous practical projects, including the Blackstone Valley Prep Residency program. This blog is inspired by the Board’s meeting last night. I can think of several more examples, although there are some exceptions.

Having all those annoying outsiders on curriculum projects is good for us. Being insulated in our own professional community is not so good. To be fair, most of our faculty reach out in some capacity and try to be useful to others. It is the return traffic that we’re often weary about (this does not apply to everyone equally). Like anyone else, we develop the echo-chamber effect; we share fundamental assumptions, and hear what we want to hear. The outsiders do not share these assumptions, and prove to be more difficult to deal with. However, they also have new ideas and fresh look at our affairs. Moreover, many of our external partners are also our customers. We do ourselves a tremendous disservice if we stop listening to what they want and need. This is the paradox: to be effective as specialists, we need to be someone insulated, to develop our own language, and to have much autonomy over our own affairs. However, these very conditions, if taken too far, damage our ability to be responsive, creative and agile. We need to maintain our professional autonomy, because without autonomy there is no responsibility. But it cannot be done without the voices of those who we serve be constantly present. I don’t know anything about programming, but it does not mean I can be ignored by programmers as a consumer of software. Just because principals, superintendants, and school committees do not know about higher education and teacher preparation does not mean we can ignore what they want. 

We need to think of ways of radically opening ourselves up to the world. We don’t have to do what we are asked by outsiders, but we cannot do anything without asking for their opinion. As a first step towards that goal, a few new rules:

1. Every committee charged with a program design or revision must either have an outsider on it, or have a way to collect systematic feedback from outside professional communities. Do both if you can. 
2. Every program must systematically subject its curriculum to the scrutiny of the profession it serves. 
3. Most projects must have an outside partner.

How to ask for money without begging

Your children’s teacher, principal, and counselor are likely to be Rhode Island College’s graduates. RIC improves Rhode Island’s knowledge-based economy and makes this a better place to live and to invest in. We do it by providing rigorous and student-centered college experience to everyone at a reasonable cost. The State’s voters, philanthropists, and legislators have long recognized our value to the public and invested in our institution. Now we need more of your support to implement critical initiatives at Feinstein School of Education and Human Development:

• First few years on the job are critical to a teacher’s career; too many talented teachers become discouraged. Help us follow our graduates into their first years and provide coaching and mentoring support. Help us nurture the new generation of smart and passionate teachers. 
• A new teacher should not only be a competent instructor, but also an agent of change. Help us give new educators skills and experiences that will make them leaders of tomorrow’s education. 
• Children learn not only in schools, but in after school and summer programs. We just designed a major and a certificate in Youth Development, a degree in Community Health and a coaching minor. Help us build on these successes and become a regional leader in the field of Youth Development. 

Dedicate you gift to one special teacher that changed your life. Remember, we need to prepare more of them for every child in Rhode Island. Contribute to the Feinstein School of Education and Human Development’s campaign My teacher is the best. Our goal is to raise one million dollars to fund innovation.

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We had a development workshop for deans about fundraising earlier today. One of the things we learned is how to construct a clear message if you are going to ask anyone for money; either an individual philanthropist or a group of people. The message should include some emotional appeal, an argument on why your organization deserves help, and also communicate how you are going to spend the money. And it should be brief, otherwise no one will read. So, it took me perhaps 2 hours to write this draft above – and it is still rough. I could have written 4-5 pages of a reasonably coherent text in that time, or send two dozen emails. But that is not what we need in this instance. I will appreciate any ideas on how to improve the blurb.

I have written already about writing shorts. It is not easy, for the more crowded is the informational space, the more effort it takes to compact rich meaning in smaller and smaller packages. Yet it is also perversely fun. I encourage anyone to take your best piece of writing, and just try to compact it to a form that is no longer compactable, but still does not lose much of the meaning. It feels like self-mutilation at times, but it works. This is why some people get paid millions of dollars for one-liners. I have heard somewhere that one word used for branding can cost 20,000-150,000 to develop at a high-end marketing company. One word, and sometimes it is not even a new word; so people pay someone to find it in the dictionary! It is not, however, something magical and we can definitely try to work on these messages internally. They may not be brilliant, but still much better. For example, last year a committee developed “ED@RIC: Change Lives!” tagline. Is still think it is a good one, and we just need to incorporate it into a more comprehensive public relations and fundraising campaign.

The flood

CEP offices were flooded this week with sewage, a third flood of those offices in recent memory. The work crew is still cleaning and drying the carpet (brand new), cutting the bottom parts of drywall, drying between the walls… It does not stink anymore, but is noisy, crowded with huge fans, workers and their tools, hot, and yucky. It could not have come at a worst time. As everyone knows, that week right before the Spring break is the hardest in academia, what they call “the cabin fever” in the West. Everyone is tired, the winter has been long (although mercifully mild), and most of us are behind on our work. A candidate came for an interview the next day after the flood. Students still need to meet; their mid-term projects still need feedback and grading.

There is no way anyone could call a sewage flood a good thing. Yet I want to say that the unexpected events like this – disasters for sure, but not mortal disasters – bring certain richness to our lives. Otherwise, life would have been too predictable, too plain. They can bring out best in people, too. I am very impressed how Monica deals with the whole mess decisively, and reasonably. I am happy to see the Facilities folks at their best, reacting quickly, and communicating with us clearly and openly. I heard how our two secretaries Ginnie and Paula solved the interview location problem without a prompt, as a matter of fact. It warms my heart to see Charlie having a conversation with a student among the chaos, both seem to be unfazed. Prachi’s office is unsafe because it flooded the second time, and yet her computer is on, and she has been working. Ellen offered a vacant office (sabbatical) to a CEP faculty as a temporary shelter. They all are stressed, I am sure, but they also use this as an opportunity to dream big and to plan for the future.

I wish I could tell about all the little acts of grace, inventiveness, creativity, and persistence that happen here around me every day, every minute. I wish I could know all the stories that happen without me. Life is endlessly fascinating.

Professional culture and the coping organization

The class I teach now uses James Wilson’s classic 1989 text Bureaucracy. He writes about the “coping organizations,” whose operators cannot be effectively observed for compliance with input procedures, and the organization does not have easily measurable outcomes. Colleges and school are like that. Professors are free to do whatever they want in their classrooms; they can only be occasionally observed, or we can get student evaluations – both are highly imperfect measures. And even when someone is clearly found to be lacking basic teaching skills, consequences are hard to enforce. The outcomes are almost impossible to measure, despite all the talk about learning outcomes. Only scholarship can be measured somewhat, although fairly imperfectly. Wilson actually says that “in coping organization, effective management is almost impossible” (Page 175), a great news for all chairs, deans, and provosts out there.

What still works well for coping organizations is professional culture and peer expectations. In some departments where the community is stronger, peer expectations are better communicated; they include professional norms, which most members will do their best to uphold. Those boil down to “doing a good job” and “pulling one’s fair share.” In such departments, faculty members do not hesitate to seek and offer help, and they find ways of informally recognizing good work and sanctioning bad behavior.

The other kind of the spectrum is a department where people withdraw into their own personal or small group niches. It is generally known who is a good teacher and who is a terrible one, but very little social reward of sanction applied to those outliers. In other words, people tend to be equally friendly with each other; no one gets cold shoulder or extra respect. The only way to maintain this sort of peace is to avoid having professional conversations at all: how are we doing, what’s good teaching, what works and what does not. In such departments, most problems are attributed to “our students,” who are too immature, or prejudiced, or not smart enough. This is an equivalent of doctors complaining of just how sick their patients are, a sure sign of the weak professional culture. Another common complaint is that administration does not know what it is doing (which may or may not be true), and we are so underpaid and overworked. All faculty everywhere feel underpaid, overworked, and incompetently managed; the difference is that in the second kind of the department, those external things are used to show how doing a good job is impossible.

Professionals, according to Wilson, are people whose reference group is primarily within their own profession, not outside. It is an exclusive club that possesses special knowledge, and enforces its own norms of good work and ethical behavior. Professional culture is actually much more important than any kind of evaluation system, any sort of incentive structure, or any administrative attempts to improve work performance. So people like me are better off trying to influence the professional culture than directly influencing either inputs or outcomes. It is very difficult to do, because shifting cultural norms is hard from the outside the group. It is, however, not that difficult from the inside. It is a matter of leadership, of taking charge, of initiating an honest discussion. The departments with suppressed professional culture always include the majority of people who do know and share the professional ethos. For a variety of reasons, they simply lost the collective habit of making those explicit. All they need to do is start talking to each other about those things we all believe are important. They should not accord each other the same level of respect, but differentiate between those who are professionals and who forgot or never knew how to be one.

The disruptive innovation

I am at the AACTE conference with a couple of colleagues. We all are impressed by how much the tone and the focus of these conferences have changed over the last few years. It used to be dominated by accreditation issues. The game was all about standards, data, and clever ways to comply. This year, the conversation is about innovation and change. The field is now obsessed by innovation, and it is not a worst possible affliction.

The keynote speaker was Clayton Christiansen, whose work we discussed at one of our TEIL meetings. He has recently applied his influential theory of disruptive innovation to higher education. The basic findings are these: First, a single course rather than an institution is becoming a unit of accreditation. A single well-developed course can be now used by very large number of people at significantly lower cost than a regular college course. Second, colleges already ceded some of the educational market to on-line institutions – the non-traditional students and those who would not have access to higher education at all. Another segment is the corporate universities who heavily rely on outsourced content delivery, and who captured much of professional development market. I can add that this also is happening in in-service teacher training. And these are the signs of typical disruptive innovation: giving up less profitable markets to lower quality producers. The trouble is, online teaching is getting better and better, and it will eventually spread into higher quality markets.

My sense is that Christiansen is exactly right. Higher education is due for a series of tremendous shocks, eventually resulting in reshaping of the industry’s landscape. Fewer institutions will be around, and those that survive will be doing different things than what we are doing now.

Christiansen is encouraging the higher education to do two things: embrace modularity (read outsource content and thus reduce cost), and concentrate on what we do best (changing people’s lives, providing meaningful experiences, and coaching/tutoring individual learners). Of course no one actually knows the future; Christiansen may be all wrong, and the new technology will not create disruptive innovation. After all, the same or similar hopes/fears were expressed about such new technologies as the television and computer-aided instruction.

What makes me believe Christiansen? - my own thinking. If we discover a great on-line low-cost module on a well-defined area, we will probably find a way of using it, instead of trying to develop expertise and teaching it ourselves. For example, if there was a great module on formative assessment or instructional technology, and it would cost less than what we spend on developing new courses, hiring a specialty faculty, etc. – tell me one reason why we should not use it in our programs? And I am pretty sure thousands of other college administrators are thinking along the same lines. We will never give up teaching, but may eventually give up delivery of some content, simply because someone else can do it cheaper and better. It is not the case yet – I do not see an abundance of cheap great online courses. The supply is not there. But it is only a matter of time.

The No-Go

Some of the most inglorious tasks that we do could be grouped as the no-go projects. We consider a new thing, or a policy change, and in the end decide not to pursue it. Those things are hard to fit into the mental schemata of successful work. First, many of us like for things to happen, not to be aborted. The biggest thrill of my job is to see what used to be just a vague idea to become reality, hopefully even benefiting some real people. This does not have to be my idea (more often it is not), but the transformation of thought into successful practice has something magical about it.

With the no-go’s; the magic ain’t happening. We may get excited about an idea, and then spend some time figuring out feasibility, even sometimes planning, only to find out that it is not going to work. The reasons are numerous; and three of them are most common. First, we may realize that what we already have is actually better than the new idea. The conversation about the new stand-alone middle level certification program seems to be going in that direction. What we have now (the endorsement program drawing from both elementary and secondary programs) is not perfect, but probably better than the new potential configuration. We still don’t know and will keep talking to the practitioners, students and faculty. Another common reason – we discover some hard policy obstacle that makes a project unfeasible (see for example, the Stone Soup program in TEIL notes). And the third most common no-go reason is the lack of resources/interest among people to do it. In other words, it does not end up high enough on the priority list. In a more narrow set of cases, with our new programs, there may not be enough student demand. Sometimes we just discover that the idea was actually pretty stupid to begin with, it is just that for some emotional reasons we did not see it right away.

You cannot really brag about the no-go projects; can’t put them on the list of our collective achievements. After the fact they look like bad ideas at best, and as failures at worst. I just looked at our project management list, and realized that subconsciously, I chose reddish color to mark them; red being an alert color. And remember at the time they seemed good enough to merit consideration, which is real work – meetings, reading, talking to people inside and outside of our group. Then it ends with a “never mind, we’re not going to do it after all.” What’s worse, in the process some people may develop attachments to the idea, and disagree with its cancellation.

But the no-go’s are not a waste of time; those are training exercises. All learning is by definition wasteful in one sense of the word. Students have no practical use for their essays, classroom drawings, or solved problems; the actual product of student work always goes to trash. The added value is in skills and experiences we create in ourselves in the no-go projects. Moreover, the conversations that begin in the no-go projects sometimes strangely carry over to other conversation, and show up in other, more successful ideas.

The world of ideas is Darwinian. Some survive, and others do not. We should acquire healthy respect for the no-go.

How to change

Our TEIL group always has intriguing discussions, and people who are not there don’t know what they are missing. Today, we were talking about why some of our curricular projects seem to move faster than others. The first initial hypothesis is the human factor – people who lead these projects are more skilled and dedicated than others. That may be a part of it. However, some interesting projects led by people who are just as dedicated and capable seem to unable to move. We also had to admit that the same people who have done something expertly and quickly, may be also dragging their feet in one of snail-paced, or failed projects. As tempting the human factor explanation is, it is really not that useful.

You can see the results of our brainstorm in rather cryptic notes. But the most interesting insight, in my opinion, was that most of our more successful projects have an outside partner or champion. Some very reasonable ideas that we all agree need to be implemented, will remain unrealized, while others take off and become reality. We’re not sure why, but the seem to have someone on the outside asking, nudging, using different timelines, asking naïve questions, misunderstanding, but also challenging our assumptions, practices, and beliefs – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. For example, TEIL had a very insightful discussion in December, trying to figure out the year-long residency dilemma. We came up with a very creative, but alas, flawed plan. However, a couple of weeks later, our Advisory Board that consists of outsiders immediately challenged our basic assumption (that schools would never pay to have student teachers), and helped to arrive at a workable solution. The lesson from this is – we need to learn to be more open. Moreover, when we identify a need to change, I will have to think hard – what would be a natural champion outside our organization? Not just an advisor, but someone who actually may have a stake in what and how we do. Another lesson is to not give up on a problem too quickly. Even though it may look like unsolvable, another pair of eyes may see an opening.

Another interesting observation – we don’t put any resources in change; all we’ve got and more goes to maintenance. Basically, everyone seems to be running around all the time to keep up with teaching, advising, writing, service, families... Curriculum design is a very time-consuming process, and there does not seem to be much time for it. The more we fall behind on improvement, the more difficult and time-consuming the regular work becomes. I actually have no idea how to solve this second problem, but perhaps you do.

The groundkeeper

Memories are often layered over a specific trigger. First big snow of the year, for example, brings me back to my mother walking me to school – or was it pre-school? – with snowy wind in my face blowing at such an exact angle that I must turn my head to take a breath. The next thing, when I was about 20, my college job was to be a groundkeeper at a preschool. When it started to snow, it meant a sleepless night for me. I had to wake up at 4, and go shovel the snow. First, I had to clear space for the morning truck to deliver food. Next were the sidewalks for parents to bring their children in. By the end of the winter, snow accumulates in piles on lawns, sometimes 10-12 feet high; every shovel of snow has to be thrown that high, in just the right motion, so it does not slide right back down. The work was hard by also strangely enjoyable; the smell of fresh snow, and sound of the shovel scraping the pavement. Dostoyevsky writes about snow shoveling in a mid-19th century Siberian penal colony in his The House of the Dead.

I also remember doing another shoveling gig at a liquor store, perhaps next winter. It was so cold one night, and the lighting was not good. I ended up removing a layer of asphalt from the pavement thinking it was ice. Asphalt becomes brittle, and easily broken by an ice pick. I thought I’d get in trouble with the management, only to discover next day the pit filled up with ice again, indistinguishable from asphalt.

Why do certain things stick in our memory forever, while an important conversation from just two weeks ago I cannot recall at all? Some of the memories are shored by emotion, some by repetition, but others are simply random. They make the patchy fabric our lives, which we spend a long time organizing, re-writing, and make coherent after the fact. The relentless snow of forgetting whites out everything, except for some islands of recognizable memories.

The new way of working

The new way of working slowly emerges. Technology needed for it existed for a while, although not in the most useable form. The issue is not the technology, but changing our own habits and assumptions about how to work.

The old way

At a meeting, everyone is handled an agenda. People read it, amend the agenda, they discuss whatever needs to be discussed. One person takes notes. The notes of the meeting are then typed up, and sent to other members to make sure nothing was omitted. This can be a special approval of minutes, or a more informal process. Then someone converts the minutes into an actionable plan, which almost always includes writing some document or a series of documents. Almost anything we do includes a policy statement, an announcement, an application, a survey instrument, etc. Many are also duplicated as web pages or published otherwise. The plan is communicated to the respective parties. Someone then writes a draft of a document, and sends it out for review. People send back their comments or corrections. The author has to incorporate all of those into a new draft, and send it again for review and comment. Alternatively, people who do little parts, report on their activities, if they remember, and someone in charge has to compile reports, so she or he can monitor the process. Then eventually the results of the project need to be either published or sent to specific people.

The new way

When a meeting is called; the agenda and the initial ideas on the issue are sent along, as a link to a Google Doc. People can add thoughts, questions, or objections on the document before the meeting ever begins. This saves time at the meeting, for all are more prepared. “What are we writing today?” is how every meeting should be started. IN other words, what are the end product? If it is a policy and an application form, we should work on those end products right away, skipping all the preliminary writing if possible. Very often the initial Doc is also reused as either a policy statement, or a discussion board, if a wider discussion is merited. As the project progresses, that doc is also used to record progress, concerns, dilemmas and whichever useful information needs to be gathered. It is often the case that projects take a long time, so participants forget what they agreed on, and what was done already. The doc is an archive, which can be quickly found and revisited. The majority of our projects are not confidential, and the doc can be openly available. Whenever someone asks for an update or a report, or a news item, we send them a link: if you need information, you plough through our working notes and find what you need. I am not doing it for you!

When we switched from typed or handwritten paperwork to files and e-mails, we gained in the speed of communication, but lost time with the ever-increasing volume of the communicated information. We lose a tremendous amount of time on e-mails, many of which are unnecessary. Just look at your inbox – it is probably a request to take some information, and covert it into a different form and share it with different people. The second shift that is going on right now is to distributed, shared information creation and consumption. It promises a significant increase in productivity, which really means cutting out all the routine and boring stuff. For example, at DLC meetings, we look at the minutes of the last meeting on screen, and correct them right there; I publish them as we speak. The minutes now have links to other documents, in case someone forgets, or is curious to drill down the information. This relieves me from the obligation to return to my office, open the file again, enter the corrections, then do something else to make the minutes public. When I return from most meetings, I do not need to sit again with my notes and translate them into actionable items, send them out to other people, etc. The minute we’re done, we’re done. I treasure those extra thirty minutes every couple of weeks, because I have more interesting things to do.

Here is another example. Last year, we spent a lot of time on creating a newsletter: I solicit information from people, and am routinely ignored. Then I pester chairs, and they pester faculty, and somehow produce blurbs and pictures. Then we edit, figure out layout, produce a PDF file, print on color printer, etc. Lots of time is spent with uncertain result.

The new way: Google Search emails me links to any news and any website changes that contain “Rhode Island College.” Most are irrelevant, but when it is our alum or a story about us, I read, and paste the link into our Face book page. When one of you sends me an e-mail with a picture or a link, I can now say, Great job, congratulations; can you please share this on Fb? This creates a semi-permanent record of news. So, when I am asked for news, I send a link. Some people still wanted us to produce another newsletter. But you know what? I am happy with the Fb format. It is not as pretty and organized as the newsletter, but it does the job. You want a newsletter? Well, go ahead, do it! If you need the information, you know where to find it.

Very few things in life are as satisfying as stopping doing things you did not enjoy doing.

Fail fast, fail cheap

One of the Freakonomics podcasts was called The Upside of Quitting; you can also listen to it. It is about the balance between the sunk cost (I put so much into this already, it is hard to abandon) and the opportunity cost (the cost of not doing something else). Their point is simple: the stigma of quitting skews our decisions; we hold on to our failures for too long. And there is also strength in persistence, no doubt. The problem is when we hold onto something just because we already poured too much money and effort into it, NOT because it still has a promise. The Vietnam War is one tragic example of the failure to fail fast.

I thinking about it while reviewing a list of projects I have started and abandoned, trying to discern good failures from bad ones. Here is an example of a better one: last semester, I thought we would do a service to many people if we accept paper copies of some assessment forms here, and have our work studies punch the numbers into our electronic databases. Some objected that this is going to mean too much work for us, but I figured faculty and cooperating teachers’ time is in the end much more valuable than the work-studies’ time. We were also trying to save on the cost of training many people and answering their technical support requests. The trouble, however, came from an unexpected direction. Because there is always a few days’ lag, it was very difficult to monitor compliance. The data could be in one of two electronic databases, or in a pile of unprocessed papers, or in transit somewhere. We just could not tell who completed and who did not, especially in the few critical days at the end of the semester. And yes, work studies and GA’s stopped working because of their own finals. So, OK, we failed, and are going back to all electronic submission. But we failed fast, relatively cheaply. On the balance sheet are negatives (a few people think we’re morons, because we change the process every semester; we lost some data; some instructors never completed the forms), and positives (we learned something from the experience, we have moved on to the next, and hopefully better system).

Bad failures happen when the sunk cost keeps increasing, because people invested their effort, their egos, and their identities into something that does not work. It still fails all the same, just too late, and too expensively. I wish we could be a little more tolerant to failure. The world is changing; it is a much more dynamic and fast-paced place than even 20 years ago. No need to be flaky and try a hundred different things, without following up on any of them. However, we should always have a few more initiatives going than we expect to complete. And most importantly, we need to be attentive and forgiving to each other’s and collective learning processes. Otherwise, people will develop an aversion to risk, and just do the same thing over and over again. And that would be a very boring place to work in.

The treasure trough of secrets

Today was one of the rare days with no meetings, and very low flow of emails. Days like that are best used for cleaning up old entangled messes and for general organizing. It is time to look into the priority list, and pull some things from the bottom of it. It is surprising how important are some of the tasks that in the middle of a crazy semester never come up to the top of the to-do list. Here is an interesting error we make - certain tasks seems insignificant not because they are, but because no one pressures us to do them. But I venture to speculate that for some of the most important things we can do there is no external pressures. No one will pressure you to write that poem, or to read that book you always knew are important.

For example, for a long time, we all thought the assessment instrument descriptions need to be edited - both for length and for consistency. They were pretty well written originally, and therefore there were always many more pressing issues to be dealt with. So today I thought I'd bite the bullet and try to clean them up. While the result may not be impressive to any of you, I was surprised how much fun it was for me. Looking at forms, rubrics, descriptions, and trying to figure out how to make them shorter, more economical, and yet detailed enough to be useful. There is a quiet and meditative quality to this. The tiny discoveries - oh, we may not need this document at all; let's just use that one for the same purpose! - these discoveries are probably similar to those of cooking or gardening, or re-writing a syllabus. They are too small to be of importance to anyone else, and are not really worth communicating to others. But we all have those. They make life enjoyable; they constitute a small treasure trough of secrets we all carry in our heads.

This reminded me, when I was about 5, my preschool buddies and I used to hide little things - candy wraps, buttons, bids - in the playground somewhere, in the dirt. Most of them were probably immediately forgotten, but some we then remembered and dug out - for no purpose, just to know one can have a little thing that is just his, and may sometimes be shared with one or two friends.

My holiday wish to you is to have a quiet moment to remember something small that is not for sharing with others. Because there is no one to judge, you can treasure it as much as you want.

Neither evil nor stupid

An explosive headline today: Providence Goes to War over Charter Schools. Another bitter fight over charter schools just ended in Cranston. People get passionate about educational reform. Yet there are more and less productive ways of debating.

In every class I have taught for the last ten years or so, student are advised: "Do not assume your opponent to be evil or stupid." Indeed, if you question your opponent's intentions and integrity, why engage in a debate? Evil has to be fought, not debated. If you think your opponent is just an idiot, a dialogue is just as pointless.

A good starting point is this: my opponent has the best intentions and really believes in what she is advocating; she is as intelligent as I am. But my opponent has a different set of experiences, and access to different information, so his opinion is different because of that. My job is to educate the opponent on how the world looks like from my point of view, but also learn why and how he came to his conclusions. The point of the debate is not only to change her mind, but also to admit the possibility of changing mine.

The charter school debate is the classic example of mismatched assumptions. The whole idea of charter schools has been presented to the educational community in the early 90-s as way to establish some space for experiment and innovation. On these terms, many believed it was a good idea. However, some people started to suspect that charter schools intend to gradually replace traditional district-run public education altogether. For example, in New Orleans, 71% of students attend a charter school. Under this assumption, most educators including me would object. The question remains - what is the intent? The proponents say the intent is still the same, the opponents say the intent has shifted. The intent is very difficult to know, and consequences of public policy do not always coincide with its intent. Like any organization on the face of the Earth, charter schools want to grow, regardless of their leader's actual intent.

My objections are theoretical: Education is not a typical market of consumer goods, and consumer choice just does not work as intended there. Unrestricted choice leads to development of concentrated educational ghettos. And as the most active and engaged parents move their children and resources to charters, traditional schools will look worse and worse. They will keep larger and larger proportion of special needs, homeless, and just very poor students with weaker family and community supports. However, FSEHD partners with several excellent charter schools, and I admire their accomplishments. A good school is a good school, and all educators have much to learn from the best of charter schools. As long as they remain a relatively small player, the negative systemic side effects will not be significant and the benefits outweigh the cost. I do not know what is the proper size of charters should be within the public school systems, but definitely not 70%.

A productive debate about charter schools should assume the integrity of intentions on both sides. It also has to focus on the real issue at hand: is this a small scale experiment or an opening act of the total charterization? I think if serious legal guarantees were developed to ensure the limits of charter schools' growth, there would be less opposition. With such guarantees, a large district like Providence can afford another charter school without crossing the threshold.

Another critical point: teachers and parents from traditional schools should see a tangible benefit of the innovation and experimentation promise. The good charters create many of excellent solutions, but there is no mechanism for spreading and adopting them in traditional schools. Charters and district schools are fairly isolated from each other, which breeds mutual suspicion, and defies the whole purpose of charter experiments. This has to be a dialogue of equals, where the best practices of traditional schools are treated with the same respect as those of charters.

Writing shorts

Yesterday, I have written 50 emails (29 on Wd, 35 on Tue, 43 on Mn), a reference letter, and worked with two differed groups on a conference program, and on a new program policy. I also put together an application form, and made a couple of Updates entries. It cannot be all that good. In fact, rest assured, most of it was not good. Even marginally decent writing takes time. Paradoxically, shorter pieces may not need less work than longer ones. In fact, proportionally speaking, shorter pieces should take much more time than longer ones. Much of misunderstandings can be avoided if we took time with our short communications. An unclear email can open a floodgate of clarifying questions. It can also create confusion, errors, hurt feelings, and many more unintended consequences.

We write more shorts because our readers are not likely to read longer ones. I love an occasional New Yorker article because it is longer than a usual magazine piece. I am assured though that the author put hundreds of hours into developing it, so it is usually very good. But an email longer than half a page is very unlikely to be read thoroughly if at all. A 20-page policy is assured a pompous oblivion. Web sites with hundreds of pages will linger unvisited. We are forced into the world of shorts, and most of us are as graceful there as an elephant in a china store.

No one teaches us how to write shorts. It is a special skill, one that becomes more and more important with time. As the nature of communication changes, “Twitterature” becomes its own art form. It will develop its masters, its own sets of rules and its own beauty and elegance. I always require students to write longer papers, just because I want to know their thinking, and to make sure they can construct a more complex argument. But now I am thinking that we should also teach them the art of brevity. The problem is not in lack of time; it is the lack of skills. The task is putting the same amount of thought into a shorter text. English is already a very economical language, with a long tradition of economical, direct and clear writing. Yet the skill does not come by itself. We can marvel at Twain’s on-liners, or Hemingway’s laconism, and yet unable to produce anything like that.

Yesterday, the Cabinet (Monica, Susan, Karen, Eileen and I) spent more than an hour writing this one page document. And note, it went through two drafts already. Why so long? - Because writing is thinking. Language stimulates our imagination, and we are better able to imagine scenarios – intended and unintended – of a policy when we’re working on explaining it. One may believe we think first, and then write our thoughts down. This is not true, of course; no thought arises outside communication, and no thought can be expressed without interpreting. Now, is our one page an example of good writing? Probably not in the aesthetic sense of the word. But we at least walked out of the meeting with some common understanding on what we want to be communicated.

Let’s try to pay attention to our short writings. It is a matter of proportion: the author should take at least twice as long to write something as it takes the reader to read. I know – we won’t be able to cope up with student and each other’s emails, you think. But I bet we’d need fewer exchanges, if we thought a little better about the message that starts it all.

Negative bias or What’s good?

My work often involves thinking and talking about problems that need to be solved. As a result, the problems come up more that their absence. This creates a bias – all the good things I know tend to be less prominent; their picture in my mind less detailed. For example, a faculty member told me that she had some great students this semester, and she observed some great lessons. But of course, the reason she was in my office was to discuss one troublesome student, which we did at length. Now I know a whole lot about the one problematic student – her history, her attitude, her errors, - but almost nothing about the good students, other than they are good. After all, we don’t need to do something about them. And I don’t think it is just my situation. Most of my colleagues also tend to worry about the things that do not work; while the positive things rarely need discussion or great analysis. Excellent papers or lesson plans are just less memorable than the bad ones, because the latter contain possible clues for how to improve.

The media’s negative bias has been known for a long time: it is hard to sell good news. It is especially difficult to sell good news if they are not really news. For example, imagine a headline “America remains a democracy with functioning legal system,” or “Rhode Island’s public schools continue to accept all children.” Does not work, right? The tendency to take good things for granted is an evolutionary trait. If it is warm and there is a fresh water lake nearby, you would be wasting your time and energy constantly reflecting on how easy it is to keep warm and on the lack of thirst. All cultures have celebrations to balance the negative bias by setting aside some time to reflect on positives. All religions also make a point of thanking their gods for the blessings. But the very fact that these mechanisms exist tell us about the initial imbalance.

The problem is that we are all working a little too much, and trying to solve too many problems. The negative bias contributes to too much stress, because less and less space remains for reflecting on all good things. The traditional cultural resources for restoring the sense of balance are not sufficient anymore. This is why we should all practice a form of cognitive restructuring, or reframing. I hereby declare a new rule. Every time one of you comes in to my office, you must tell me what is the best thing that happened to you lately; describe in some detail. I will do the same when I come to you. Instead of greeting each other “How are you?,” Let’s use “What’s good?” If we start with those conversations, perhaps the problems may appear in their proper proportions, and we won’t stress over the small stuff. You can tell I am getting into the holiday spirit. It’s all the music in the mall.

Who is in the audience?

There is an essential tension hidden in our professional language. On one hand, every profession needs its jargon. The special language signifies the profession’s separateness, its special knowledge. Moreover, the professional language is an important claim to authority. Using common language in professional work would be exhausting, because we would need to redefine over and over again whole concepts and theories compressed into the specialized professional words. There is no legal profession without the legalese, and no medical profession without the doctor-speak. On the other hand, we in teacher education are subject to more and more scrutiny, and often public criticism. The public does not know what we do and how we do it. When criticism – fair or unfair – comes our way, the response cannot be presented in the esoteric language no one outside the profession understands. Additionally, what we always treated as our internal documents – programs, catalog entries, program outcomes, learning objectives – all of it became public, instantly available to potentially much wider audience. Our closest partner communities – teachers, principals, superintendants – are demanding their opinions to be considered in teacher preparation. And even though their own professional languages are much closer to our own, they need extra assurances that we are attentive to the rapid changes in their professions, which we serve. And finally, our own students should become partners in their own preparation. To reach out to them, we must be able to explain our purposes and processes in a language they can understand.

We still need to maintain the professional language; without it, we lose identity and dumb down our thinking. And yet I believe we are now faced with an additional challenge, a task to translate our thinking into the everyday language. I must say, we are not good at it. Most of us are not great communicators where it comes to media, and to just simply crossing professional boundaries. Look through our brochures and websites. Nowhere do we explain simply that students go through a number of practical hands-on experiences, that we evaluate and monitor their every step, or that we have an extensive set of screening mechanisms. The simplest things – like what we want future teachers to be able to do – is expressed in professional lingo that has very little meaning for a lay person. See for example, RIPTS or our conceptual framework competencies. They make perfect sense to you if you are within the field, but not to anyone outside. Just try imagine a reporter asking– what are you trying to teach the future teachers? Well, we have a set of twelve competencies, in four groups. For example, “Human Learning and Development: Reflective practitioners have a solid grounding in educational psychology, the branch of psychology that specializes in understanding teaching and learning in educational settings. They know the four pillars of educational psychology: human development, theories of learning and cognition, classroom management, and assessment.” Well, can you explain to our readers what does it mean, exactly? We can’t do that right now, nor did we ever identify it as a priority to do so.

It is important to us to become better public communicators. We need to translate our program’s purposes and practices into the regular lay language, and keep those translations not only publicly available, but also committed to memory. Our audience has expanded, and we may not have noticed.

On Federalism

The RIC/AFT Agreement was developed some time ago, under the assumption that each Department operates more or less independently on all things academic and personnel. This was the time-honored tradition of liberal education, with its respect for academic freedom and faculty governance. However, things have changed. As a professional school, we now have some serious accreditation, public relations, and assessment needs. In many respects, we need to operate as one unit. For example, we absolutely need to have a Unit-wide assessment system. It would really be nice (although not critical) if course evaluations became a part of that system. We need to speak with one voice on the issues of educational reform and policy. The power is in synergy and common resources. It is simply more efficient to have centralized data storage solutions. We would save time and effort by doing less manual work. It is also very important to develop a common response to the challenges and demands of our respective communities of practitioners. For example, we are expected to modernize our curriculum, to establish common admission and graduation policies, etc, etc.

So we’ve got to set up some long-term agreement amongst ourselves. This does not mean we overrule or contradict the Agreement. No, it has to be a strictly voluntary decision of every department to delegate part of its authority to the School (not to the Dean’s office). In essence, it is the federalism debate on a smaller scale.

There are two cases that brought the issue to the surface. We tried two relatively minor things: to develop a common course evaluation instrument, and to revise the Governance Document. Both areas are explicitly within the scope of authority of departments. Inalienable rights, so to speak. Perhaps naively, I thought we can just develop some drafts with participation of all departments, and then ask each department to vote to accept, and voila. Well, it did not quite work so well. Of course, departments cannot participate in their entirety in development of the drafts. Their “delegates” do not have the explicit authority to negotiate on behalf of all. The timelines are not identical. For example, three departments have adopted the course evaluation instrument, one has small editorial suggestions, and one more has developed an alternative proposal. But we cannot really take the proposals back to the departments that already approved them, and ask to vote on amended drafts. Where the documents were approved, faculty were not perfectly happy, they just decided to compromise and try it out. If you ask to reconsider, they will remember that they, too, had suggestions at the time. And if another department can introduce its corrections, why cannot we? This would create an endless cycle of revisions and counter-revisions. In fact, nothing would be accomplished at all, because faculty from one department are unable to talk directly to all other faculty. The reasoning and the rationale gets lost and misinterpreted. Basically, we have a system where each state has a veto power over any law, no matter how fundamental or trivial.

Should we write 85 papers, or can we just read the Federalist Papers? I mean, the American democracy is a mess, but it has been functioning for a very long time, and almost always better than any other mess out there. Maybe the challenge is not as difficult?

The DLC decided to develop the Charter simply because the existing governance document was a bit out of date. Earlier drafts of the Charter had some more radical ideas; they are all gone in the latest draft. If anything, it is perhaps a document that is a little thin on substance. But perhaps the real issue it needs to address is federalism within FSEHD. We do need a constitution. Some issues should still remain in the exclusive jurisdiction of departments. For other issues, we need to figure out a way of making deliberate decisions, but in a timely manner, and not paralyzed by vetoes. We need a process where people can participate and express their professional and personal opinion, and yet a process that has a beginning and an end. Perhaps we need a congress of some sort, or maybe DLC can be trusted to fulfill that role. I don’t know; this is a call for founding fathers and founding mothers. I do know that without the agreement on how to deal with disagreements, we are divided and weak, and our capacity for change is limited.

A modest proposal

            -By Johnathan Swift (as recorded by me)

It is a pity that the outstanding certification policy just adopted by the RI Board of Regents does not fully develop all of its brilliant ideas. I shall take one such idea and apply it consistently, with rigor and enthusiasm. The idea is to abolish requiring advanced degrees of advanced teachers, because there is indeed little evidence that said degrees improve test scores of students. It is commonly known that absence of conclusive evidence to support a claim is irrefutable evidence against the claim. For example, if you eat salad, but are still overweight, salad surely makes you fat! If you groom yourself and still cannot get a date, stop grooming and you shall attract members of the desired sex! Thank God for scientific reasoning! How shall we extend this brilliant idea further?

1.                   The proposal still requires all administrators, support professionals, and specialists to obtain an “advanced degree.” The dreadful phrase appears 18 times in the document! Surely, if it is not good for teachers, it must not be good for anyone else. There is no scientific proof that a principal or a school psychologist with an advanced degree raises children’s test scores. These degrees are issued by the same disreputable colleges caught peddling useless master’s degrees to teachers. If you have the courage to stop the fraud, stop all of it! District-directed, job-embedded professional development will naturally turn an individual into a superb principal, or an excellent superintendent! One will soak up the wisdom of being a Reading or an ESL specialist from having thoughtful conversations with colleagues, and reading powerful books. If this works for teachers, it should work for all!

2.                   No evidence exists that a bachelor’s degree causes a teacher more likely to raise student test scores. I implore the Board to exercise simple logic: A bachelor’s degree is just another pointless academic credential, a collection of seat time sold by the same despicable institutions of so-called “higher learning.” Isn’t it better to measure the effectiveness of teachers directly without regard to their credentials whatsoever? Therefore, bachelor’s degrees are unnecessary. We have the mighty educator evaluation system you all saw working so well for so long! Why certify, if we can evaluate?

3.                   And while we at it, why not abolish the very concept of the approved teacher preparation program! After all, anyone can just teach oneself to be a great teacher by engaging with great books, thoughtful conversations, and worthy examples. Even a shoe store should be allowed to train teachers, as long as they raise the test scores. If we happen to hire a teacher who cannot read, for example, well, his students will not show any growth. Within a few years, we will know that we made a mistake, chastise the shoe store, and fire the teacher. Our children are the least expensive and most convenient instruments for measuring teacher quality!

4.                   Don’t dictate what a teacher can do! You are already prepared to send elementary and high school teachers to middle schools. Let worthy individuals teach music one week, and calculus the next, preschool one year, and an AP class the next. We all know that principals possess the uncanny intuitive ability of judging every teacher’s talents just by looking at them. Principals famously have the ultimate power to hire whomever they want. You have embarked on the glorious path to deregulation that did wonders for this nation’s economy recently. Deregulate until it hurts!

5.                   Attention, the biggest fraud of all times will be exposed now. Did you know that economic research so far failed to demonstrate a convincing link between the high school diploma and worker productivity? It is not clear if schooling is simply a screening mechanism to select talent, or it actually raises productivity. Over 1000 scholarly papershave been published on the subject only in the last ten years. Still no proof! And we already established, no proof is the proof of the opposite! High school diploma is not proven to be good; therefore it is bad and must be abolished. Improve the quality of all education by not requiring it!

6.                   And finally, not even a shred of research evidence supports the claim that having a board regulating education policy has any effect on the test scores. If you abolish advanced degrees, bachelor’s degrees and high school diplomas, there will be nothing to regulate anyway! Take your brilliant idea seriously. Abolish yourselves tonight, for there is no proof you are useful!

I should like to take this opportunity to announce that the Jonathan Swift award goes to Rhode Island, the first government in the world that will improve teacher quality by lowering its expectations for teacher learning.

Brilliant, simply brilliant!