DO SOMETHING!

The Art and Practice of Project-Based

Contents

Preface                                                                               

A Century of Success                                                    

The Professional Educator                                          

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go                        

What's Old is New                                                       

Teaching to the Test                                                   

Closing the Circle                                                           

Why Change When the Classroom is Disappearing?                                                           

Redefining a Successful Education                           

Getting Started                                                             

Where's the Beef?                                                      

Conclusion                                                                          

References                                                                       

When we set out to write this book our intent was to relate in a humorous and serious way the decades of experience that we have in project-based active learning as classroom teachers and professional development experts.  Along the way we would highlight some of the tools that we used and point the interested reader in the direction of more resources.  If as a result of our, at times, less that sacrosanct attitude we inadvertently offend some readers, we can only say get over it.   The title of this book is DO SOMETHING!  If you do something you may do it right or you may do it wrong.  If you seek out good counsel your chances of doing something good will increase.  If you do nothing then one year from now (or five years) you will still have the same choice to make, so why not make the right choice now.

What is the right choice?  Keep reading, I hope we're not that obtuse that you don't get it, eventually.  We're not going to bore you with theoretical pontification or gratuitously drop names, unless it makes us look particularly brilliant.  We will relate some stories, present some real cases, apply some valuable tools, and generally have a good time.  It is not our intention to present a scholarly review of teaching and learning.  If that is what you are looking for we suggest you wade through Pascarella and Terenzini's voluminous review titled How College Affects Students.  Rather it is our goal to present a 'how to' book that guides and instructs the reader in project-based, active learning.  We also will support our work with examples from our own experience. 

"If I could keep time in a bottle…"

As full time educators we know all too well the challenges and opportunities of teaching in the information age.  On the one hand we have students that wonder why they have to learn this stuff, and on the other hand we have various administrative and political factions attempting to impose simplistic assessments to answer the question "How'm I doing?" as popularized by a famous New York mayor.  We cycle in and out of in-services where the latest Dr. Guru sagaciously overlooks the room and proclaims "There's a problem in education!" staring directly at you.  You're thinking "I wonder if we're going to get out early?"  All during the day you're planning the next week's classroom activities with a certain amusement and disdain for those few of your colleagues that actually take this stuff seriously.  If you only knew the dehumanization that Dr. Guru was subjected to by the nation's airline industry to come to your school you would surely pity him, but, alas, he'll be gone tomorrow and you'll still have six periods of those bright faces to deal with.

Sound familiar?  It happens everyday at thousands of places across the nation.  It is a true growth industry in the next "great idea".  

The sad circumstance is that there really is no mystery of learning that's waiting to be solved.  We haven't been held back by a lack of technology or talent.   Even the advances in brain-based learning and cognitive science only affirm what we have known for thousands of years and seriously discussed in the context of public education during the last 100 years.  That well guarded secret is that we learn best by being actively involved, where the content is couched in a meaningful and relevant context, and where the criteria for performance reflect a real world standard. 

That such a statement should be debated is refuted by every learning situation that a child faces.  Do we give a baby a lecture on walking?  Would a little reading assignment on the bio-kinetics of human motion make the difference between a stumbling novice walker and an expert master walker?  Of course not, the child learns by doing and becomes more proficient by a process of continuous improvement.  The same scenario could be played out with respect to a child learning to talk, ride a bike or toss a ball.

How do these examples relate to the situation in our schools?  In simple terms, the predominant mode of instruction is some form of 'drill and kill'. This didactic approach has a remarkable persistence given the nearly universal acceptance that it ill serves the vast majority of the student population.  The defining characteristics of this pervasive methodology are teacher-centered classrooms, memorization, subject matter compartmentalization, and a school-focused context.

Let's examine these familiar educational characteristics by asking several questions.  Are real jobs subject matter compartmentalized?  Is real life subject matter compartmentalized?   No, and double no!  Then why do we try to teach content devoid of context?   Because we have not created the capacity with our professional educators to integrate the curriculum and create meaningful contexts for learning.

At this point many readers, particularly professional educators, will be shouting at this book that they do, in fact, teach with real world contexts and a multidisciplinary scope.  We're sorry, we thought you understood that we were referring to those other teachers.  I'm glad we got that straightened out.  You know the guy, the one that interrupts Dr. Guru and says we tried that back when, all kids need to do is work harder, and he's not going to teach math any different now than he's done for the last 300 years.

The truth of the matter is that all across the country, at every school, teachers are making connections and engaging students in innovative projects.   Too often the public does not see the outstanding efforts and accomplishments that are going on in public and private education.  The chattering class chooses to microscopically examine every violent incident that occurs at a school then zooms out to stellar dimensions to proclaim and decry the hopeless state of education and society.  Sometimes we wonder how these people made it through college, then we remember that they didn't have to take any of the hard classes and we have our answer.

Let us once and for all say that teachers are doing a great job for we have seen evidence of this in every school that we have visited.  As we shall elaborate on later, the problem is that things have changed, and the job of teacher needs to dramatically change if a modern education is to remain relevant.  From top to bottom the educational system must recognize and respond to the changing paradigm of education in an information rich environment.  The colleges of education, where future teachers are cultivated, must be at the forefront of this paradigm shift.   Sadly, they have been the least responsive so far.  It has been our experience that the acceptance for and implementation of change has been resisted in direct proportion to the grade level of the teacher involved.  The most accommodating have been the lower and upper elementary teachers who have an intuitive understanding of active learning and making connections.  In contrast to this the institutions of higher learning, i.e. our colleges and universities, have been the least responsive to change.   Their retort would surely be that they have created many centers for learning and teaching to address the perceived needs, but the reality is that very little changes in the classrooms.  It's always the same people (the one's that don't need it) attending the seminars and workshops on how to improve teaching and learning, but never the people that should be attending. 

This situation is changing in both positive and negative ways.  On the positive side we are seeing many professors that are innovating in the classroom.  There are numerous journal articles on alternative teaching strategies appearing with each issue.  In fact, as one examines the yearly workshops sponsored by the NSF we are seeing many more workshops that are dealing with the concept of teacher improvement at the collegiate level.  Changes at the college level are being driven in positive ways by pressure from below as students revolt upon entering the traditional college classroom from more innovative K-12 classrooms.  Responsive faculty, desiring to create a student friendly learning environment, readily seek out new ways to address the learning needs of their classes.  Such efforts greatly assist in raising the retention rate as students progress from freshman to graduating senior. 

In contrast on the negative side, a natural response by administrations to the reluctance of faculty to implement meaningful change will be to create more distance learning and web-based learning opportunities that circumvent the faculty.

We have titled this chapter A Century of Success to highlight the profoundly successful accomplishments of the public education system in the last 100+ years.  There can be no debate that the industrial age model of education served brilliantly in educating and training the population until the advent of the information age.  The seeds of change may be traced to a period prior to the introduction of the PC, but its influence in accelerating the change process is clear.

The recognition of the need for change and the scholarly support buttressing this perception have led a few brave souls to venture into pedagogically virgin territory.  Some have embraced cooperative learning, peer instruction, collaborative learning, case studies and other forms of alternative learning strategies.  Whatever the choice or combination of learning strategies that are implemented one thing is brutally obvious, that is that all of these strategies facilitate student learning through student-centered activities i.e. active learning.

Many faculty believe that all learning is active since students are inherently active when listening to lecture presentations in the classroom.   The misconception in this view is that 'some' activity does not mean that the format can be described as 'active'.  Also, being active does not mean that connections are being made and assessments are authentic.  The best learning is active, not passive and some of the characteristics of active learning are doing, making, constructing, arranging, calculating and changing.  For learners to exhibit these characteristics they must read, research, record, discuss, debate, defend, program, write and be engaged in solving real world problems set in real world contexts with authentic performance expectations.  By engaging in these actions students will activate higher-order thinking tasks, such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation.  Charles C. Bonwell and James A. Eison have proposed a definition of active learning that states, "active learning is defined as instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing".  This is comparable to Dewey's statement that "we learn best by doing and then reflecting on what we've done."

There has not been a single professional development workshop that we have done in which someone has not brought up the question of content.  It is always raised in the context of having to meet the requirements of standardized tests and state-mandated examinations.  The question somehow assumes that the current state of affairs is adequately addressing these standardized tests.  Have these people been reading the tabulations of how American students compare academically?  If they have they surely wouldn't be trying to defend the status quo.  Of course, you can't so bluntly point out these inconsistencies, rather one must listen carefully and try to understand the fear and anxiety behind the questions.  What they are really saying is that they are afraid of change, afraid of something new, afraid they won't do it right, and afraid it will impact their career advancement. 

One of the questions that we ask all teachers that we work with is "Why did you choose teaching as a career?"   No one has ever said, "Because I wanted to have a job where I could reform the entire curriculum and change the way my job was done."  Most people won't admit it, but deep down teaching appealed to them because they figured out how to succeed in school, had at least 17 years of exposure to the job site and it was safe and predictable because once they learned their area they were pretty much set.  Now because of external factors in society we come along and tell current teachers that they must do everything different.  This is a recipe for anxiety and distrust.  So when we get those predictable questions our temptation may be to jump all over the questioner, but we don't because we try to remind ourselves that we were once in their position.  So what about those questions relating to content, learning styles and methods of assessment?

Many research studies have demonstrated that the implementation of active learning in classrooms results in comparable or superior mastery of content to the traditional lecture based mode of instruction.  This is best accomplished when rigorous content standards are correlated with learning targets and connected to real world contexts.  These two criteria insure that students see and understand the focus of the learning and can relate it to authentic real world connections.

The current recidivism evident in the back to basics movement deserves some comment.  Given the appalling language and math skills of students it is understandable that the politically expedient response would be to advocate a return to the ‘basics’, best characterized by rote memorization and classroom drills.  In fact, some states have abandoned whole language in favor of more traditional methods.  A recent long-term study of pre-K to third grade has strongly indicated that these young children are not developing adequate skills in the crucial language and math areas.  The blame is placed squarely on the ‘progressive’ education movement associated with the philosophy of Dewey.  Actually, we believe that Dewey would be appalled by the practices that have been labeled progressive.  Dewey said that the “belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative”.  The failed whole language movement certainly lands with a resounding thud squarely in the center of not ‘genuinely educative’.  Dewey has been unfairly maligned by those wanting to terminate all educational reform that does not produce a classroom resembling their grandparent’s classroom.  

We cannot discount the results of the study mentioned above, but we can hope to point out the danger of broadly dispersing the conclusions.  The study points to the need for methods that develop firm foundations in language and math in the early years.  Proven methods already exist to meet this objective.  To take the study’s conclusions further would be inappropriate.  For instance, it might be extrapolated from this study that project-based learning is wrong at all grade levels.  Such a response ignores the overwhelming cry from business and industry for educators to teach higher order thinking skills, teamwork and communication.  These skills can only be adequately developed through a curriculum that is project-based, active and makes real world connections.

Returning to the question of content coverage, there are many teaching styles that can fulfill the criteria that fall short of the mark when it comes to addressing multiple intelligences and activating higher order thinking skills.  An active learning approach inherently requires the use of alternative learning strategies that cut across the entire landscape of learning styles.  From the limited use of focused lectures to the extensive use of cooperative groups, active learning environments use a multitude of learning strategies to address the different learning styles of students.   Depending upon the particular class we have seen upwards of 85% of the students defined as predominantly 'tactile' learners (bodily-kinesthetic), ill-suited to lecture based instruction.

In addition to addressing the important areas of Multiple Intelligences as defined by Gardener, properly constructed active learning foundationally requires that students analyze and apply knowledge across an integrated curriculum to solve real world problems with performance criteria which match real world expectations.  These higher-order thinking expectations cannot be met through the traditional 'drill and kill' classroom methodology.

If the context of learning is placed within the real world then the assessment will be authentic.  Authentic assessments have two characteristics according to Grant Wiggins, widely recognized educational leader in assessment and evaluation.  One feature of authentic assessment is that it is designed to represent the actual performance in a particular field.  The second feature is that the criteria used reflect the essential elements of performance as determined in light of well-articulated performance standards.

In conclusion, project-based active learning is learner-centered instead of teacher-centered.  Through the creation of active learning environments, requiring the use of alternative learning strategies and authentic assessments, the learner becomes responsible for their learning.  The academic content acquires meaning through real world contextual application and generic skills are explicitly developed and in-grained.   The clear detailing of expectations and the continuous measurement process helps to demonstrate the value of both the content and foundational skills as the learner takes responsibility for their own learning process.

"I just want to bang on these drums"

We're sure that you recall the advertisement for the Peace Corps that refers to it as the toughest job you'll ever love.  As we all know, that should be referring to teaching.  Today's professional educator must be a truly renaissance individual with a grasp of many academic subjects and an understanding of how both children and adults learn.  The reality of the profession is that if you don't love it enough to be a lifelong learner then your career will be a daily grind punctuated by short periods of extreme anxiety interrupted by all too brief summer respites.  The career of professional educator for today is not the default career, nor was it ever, but it is qualitatively different from the past.

Previously the role of educator could be defined in terms of classrooms full of attentive students that read assignments, wrote papers, performed experiments, did homework and took tests.  While this may seem that it has always been this way, in reality this type of pedagogy is more a manifestation of the Industrial Age.  Some have even advocated a return to the apprenticeship model of learning that dominated for thousands of years.  Neither of these pedagogies is suited to the new realities of the Information Age.

These contrasts between the realities of our grandparent’s classroom and the needs of today’s children is why today's teachers face a more difficult situation than their predecessors.  They are living and working in the transition period.  Their institutional memory recalls a school environment that hasn't changed in more than 150 years, but they live their lives in a world that is changing daily to accommodate new technology and new thinking.  To students and teachers the educational system must seem an anachronism.

The classroom of the, not so distant, future must be vastly different from today's in order to account for the changing environment that students experience in their daily lives.  The student of today is a far more interactive learner who will readily dive in and try something and learn by experimentation and practice.

The teachers of tomorrow face a much easier future in the classroom because they will have been educated in a way that embraces the new technology.  The pedagogical innovations occurring across the nation will not be unique or novel to them, as they are to us now.  Rather the classroom environment characterized by students that are engaged in learning, making real world connections, and student performances measured against real world authentic standards will be the norm to teachers of the future.  We aren’t naïve enough to believe that there won't be some recalcitrant holdouts still teaching in the old paradigm over the next 40 years, but the quicker we reform the teacher education programs across the nation the faster we can make the transition to classrooms where the old industrial model cannot survive.

The transition will not be an easy one.  Just think of all the vested groups that would rather not see things change.  At the present time administrators are forced to apply simplistic measures of performance to students and teachers that really have very little to do with the skills necessary to thrive in the information age.  They succumb to the pressure to raise standards as dictated by a single numerical measure with programs that drive the teachers in the opposite direction of real reform. 

We've never met any teacher that said with smile that they were very happy having to 'teach to the test'.  Teachers know that 'teaching to the test' is a disservice to students, but the system gives them little choice in the matter.

Lest you think that we're picking on administration alone, let's not forget the teacher unions.  They, too, are having difficulty adjusting to the new realities.  The traditional confrontational attitude of 'us vs. them' has been extremely detrimental to teaching as a profession, and the unions really don't know any other mode of operation.   Even now initiatives to reform teaching and learning that are sponsored by the unions always seem to have a built in bias toward protecting faculty.  For example, even though the evidence is conflicting about the usefulness of smaller class sizes, nevertheless the shrill cry from unions is "We need smaller classes!"  That will result in a need for more teachers, and, of course, that is how they get their membership, so it's an understandable tactic.

There are other more endemic and structural barriers to reform that are not as obvious as the teachers and administrators.  By way of illustration we will relate a conversation that we had with a colleague that teaches in the science area.  While discussing changes in teaching and different learning styles this teacher rather proudly proclaimed that nationwide the grades that students earned in his subject area were historically used as a predictor of success by colleges and professional schools.  As such he concluded, that in order to uphold this standard, he must make sure he covers everything.

Somehow teachers in this area have been convinced to act as members of the selection committee for programs two or three years downstream.  Instead of seeing as their primary responsibility that every student learns to their maximum potential the material in this subject area, these faculty seem to take perverse pride in being the 'sorting and selecting' mechanism for others.

To be fair to this faculty member he did relate a story of a teacher in this area who, after 30 years, had changed the way he was teaching to a more student centered learning approach, and the results were that more students did better than previously by huge margins.  Imagine the quandary of future selection committees?  Now they have to actually evaluate candidates in a more meaningful way.

Another common argument against doing something, that is heard at workshops, is the defense that, even if K-12 embraces project-based, active learning, when students get to college they will be unable to cope with the didactic approach that is pervasive at that level.  That sounds like one of those arguments that our mothers so deftly turned away by asking us if our friends jumped off a bridge, would we do it too?  While colleges and universities don't respond as rapidly to customer pressure as business does, eventually they do respond because students have the ability to vote with their feet.   Anyone that hasn't been in the classroom in the last five years doesn't realize that students have become more vocal, more demanding and less tolerant of having their time wasted.  And trust us when we say, that once students taste real learning they will no longer accept the dried up morsels so pedantically delivered from the podium by Professor Fossilmeister and his minions of teaching assistants.  This revolution is coming to higher education as a result of pressure from below, and is manifesting itself in the college classrooms in a sporadic, but ever increasing manner.

Successful educators of the next millennium will be those that create learning environments in which students work together and learn together with the teacher in a role more analogous to a coach.  Today's educators that deliver copious volumes of content will be marginalized by students that refuse to participate in the traditional educational model characterized by sequential layering of information in the hope that knowledge will result.

So, you can see that there are built in barriers to reform that are unseen and, perhaps, unintentional that need to be addressed.  These barriers span a student's entire educational universe from family, community, career, and government.   Tomorrow's professional educator must be aware of the explicit and implicit barriers to effective and meaningful education.  Their private classroom domain of yesteryear has been invaded and conquered even if they haven't yet surrendered to reality.   The survivors will succeed by embracing the new paradigm, not because they have no choice, but because they recognize that it is a better way.

"If a picture paints a thousand words, then why can't I paint you?"

Sometime try imagining yourself as a little bit of information residing in the brain of a student.  Maybe you're a Civil War factoid, a quote from Shakespeare or a particular formula in algebra.  You patiently wait until the call goes out for you to do your stuff.  The problem is that your address has been misplaced and your resume is missing so even if the situation occurred where you could be helpful, no one thinks to contact you.  Surely when you first took up residence it was the result of a conscious effort to meet a specific need.  So even if that need arises again you are amply prepared or are you?  Imagine if your services haven't been needed for quite some time and during that interim many other bits of information have taken up residence in your neighborhood.  New streets now criss-cross the landscape where before there was only one road going both ways.  In fact as you have monitored events you have seen many instances when your expertise would have proven invaluable, but no clarion call was forthcoming, so you waited.  Even in those instances where the situation exactly matches the circumstances that existed when you first took up residence an external impetus is often needed to prompt your recall to active service.  Usually opportunity to serve is squandered through a failure to be considered as relevant to the need at hand.

Some will recognize the scenario just sketched out as David Perkins (no, we're not beneath dropping names if it will make us look good) concepts relating to inert knowledge, ritual knowledge and missing knowledge.  Without the benefit of learning through a meaningful context most information becomes of little value.  

Our classic story relating to ritual and inert knowledge comes from an algebra-based physics course we taught for several years.  We used the highly successful Competency Based Instruction approach perfected by Peter Signell and Jules Kovacs (name dropping again) of the Physics Department at Michigan State University.  This approach is essentially mastery learning which is an approach that posits that all students can learn when provided with the appropriate conditions.  The application of this learning method fits well with content-focus curricula where learning objectives can be broken into small, sequential units.  The teacher is a facilitator and guide, and, also, serves as a tutor for students as they struggle through the content.

In such a format students worked individually and in groups at their own pace with some incentives for maintaining a prescribed pace.   Students developed an understanding of the material through reading short units, working example problems, by taking quizzes and accumulating points until they had enough to earn the grade that they wanted. 

One student, let's call him Kiel, because that's his name, kept coming up day after day to get help, which we were happy to give except that there's a catch.  If the query has to do with something clearly answered in the written material or if it's pre-requisite knowledge then the student would have points deducted. 

Now you have the scenario, and time after time Kiel would approach the consultant with questions that neatly fit into the above two categories.

As an aside, it is all to easy to dwell on our failures and successes, bouncing emotionally from despair to elation, but don't fall for that trap, it is a no win situation.

Back to the true story.  On one particular day Kiel seemed even more frustrated than usual, and so we engaged him in a discussion trying to isolate the causes of his difficulty with this course.  Very quickly it became apparent that the impediment was in the math area, so we presented him with a series of simple algebra problems that should map precisely with physics relationships that he was studying.   It became clear that Kiel could not relate his knowledge in algebra, i.e. the relationship between x and y in the equation y = 3x, and apply it in physics where y would become a force, F, and x would be represented by the acceleration, a, thereby giving the Newtonian force equation, F = 3a, for a 3 kg object subjected to an external force resulting in subsequent acceleration.  Even more devastating for Kiel was his inability to extend his algebra knowledge about equations like y = 3x to equations such as 1/y + 1/x = 1/3.  He was lost, and, yet, he had received B+'s and A-'s in all the pre-requisite math classes.  Kiel had tremendous ritual knowledge skills for solving problems he'd seen before.  He also had quite a bit of inert knowledge because given the right prompting he could recall some pertinent information. 

Kiel may have been a real student, but he was certainly not a unique student.  He was just unwilling and unable to think outside the box that the system had him confined within.  Not long after this Kiel decided to drop the course explaining that he "didn't think this was going to be a reading course!"  We have tried to learn from our failures and successes, but ultimately the 'Kiels' out there indict the entire system.

So what does this story have to do with project-based, active learning?  Well, without some context that gave Kiel a frame of reference from which to understand the information that he already possessed he was unable to draw that information out in order to apply it to new situations.  Even though the physics was being presented in somewhat of a contextual manner, the prerequisite knowledge had not been learned except by rote and ritual. Other students flourished or floundered depending upon their prior success at the system. 

What was clear, however, was that the CBI approach made a difference in overall performance.  The class average was one-half a grade to one full grade better than comparable classes that received the traditional approach.  In particular, students appreciated the degree of freedom that they had with respect to the pace of their learning and their choice of optional areas of study and these aspects made the learning process more enjoyable. 

These small successes in self-guided learning, where the teacher is a guide and coach, formed the nucleus of a growing appreciation of the necessary ingredients for project-based, active learning.  Until the teacher can step aside, let learning occur, and accept that it may take many unanticipated directions, he will be instinctually compelled to constrain the learning situation to within familiar boundaries according to accepted conventions. 

We would be painting too rosy of a picture if we didn't acknowledge that the role of 'change agent' is risky, as well as rewarding.  If you embark on the path of project-based, active learning the path can be lonely and frustrating, particularly when dealing with you own colleagues.  Machiavelli wrote "There is no more dangerous…conduct…than to step up as a leader in the introduction of change."  However, the rewards of witnessing true learning taking place and knowing that you have made a difference in a student's capacity to access the benefits of the new millenium are far greater than the risks.  In fact, imagine trying to explain to a former student ten years from now why you didn't think it was necessary to prepare them for this new age. 

As you tentatively implement small changes in your classroom, you will witness unexpected consequences.  For instance, a teacher related to us that he had begun to dedicate each Friday’s class to some type of short-term team project whose context was related to the week’s subject area content.  He said, “I’m afraid they’re learning more on Friday than all the rest of the week combined.”  He is well on his way towards creating a meaningful learning environment for his students.

As you persevere towards building a truly new learning environment, you will find that your students and you have taken on new and evolving roles.  For example, after years of conditioning, our nearly automatic response to student inquiries is "How are you going to solve this?"  This is not meant to say that we are not doing our job or are simply dismissing the student's problem, rather it is designed to create an environment where the student can discuss and discover possible solutions. 

Sometimes it is clear that there is a roadblock to progress.   When that is the case some prompting may be required.  However, as we quickly discovered, students generally will see the pathway after very modest prompting (inert knowledge again), and if you continue to pontificate on the problem, they have been known to politely tell us to go away because they will solve their problem now.  They know that deep inside you really want to solve their problem for them, but if you train them to know how to solve their own problems, they will do it for themselves.  You know you are done teaching them when they don't need you any more.  Don't worry, there's another batch right behind these ones.

While there are many that are comfortable with the present situation, a growing segment of academe recognizes the fundamental transformation that must occur, and they are actively working toward making it a reality.  The difficulty for the education industry is that its very nature is to act as a moderator of change, and the current circumstances are forcing a timeframe for change that is too brief for easy accommodation.  Such conditions usually result in revolutionary change that will be viewed historically as having been inevitable.

"I'm older now, but still running against the wind."

Even though the ideas of William James, John Dewey and others are old, the current environment imbues them with renewed vitality.  Why?  Because prior to the creation of the PC, the Internet and the dawn of the information explosion an educator could essentially run a classroom along the lines of a feudal system.  We are lord and master, and you will do what we tell you, when we tell you.  We are your source.   As the Billy Joel song goes, "I can't be convicted, I've earned my degree."  

Then without so much as a "How do you do?" along comes a mode of information delivery that you can't control and its scope is more vast than anyone could imagine.  And it's virtually free.

Quite suddenly your exalted position of sage on the stage lacks exclusivity.  In fact, your students are now teaching you new things everyday from thousands of different sources.  The straightforward linearity that has characterized your philosophy of education no longer fits nor satisfies.  The building blocks that you used to neatly position one upon the other that created a strong foundation, now lie strewn about the mental landscape.  We cannot help but feel some compassion, particularly for those in higher education, that entered the ranks of the professoriate in the 60's and 70's.  These could definitely be called the hay days of academe.  They became accustomed to a climate that treated them as if they were the primary reason for the existence of the institution.  The industry maintained a firm grip on the monopoly of higher education as more and more students desired entrance into the realm of the educational elite.  Murmurs of the unraveling of this monopoly quietly began to permeate the staid environment in the middle 80's and 90's, but a full recognition of the impending climate of educational competition still evades most in higher education.  The K-12 education industry has already seen competition creeping into their domain in the form of charter schools and voucher plans.  They nervously look over their shoulders as business and industry makes demands for better educated students.  Meanwhile Dr. Guru's voice rings  in your ear "There's a problem in education!"

There are all too many instances where prognosticators have been embarrassingly flawed, but with caution to the wind we predict that the confluence of present circumstances are unique and will be viewed by future generations as marking a revolutionary change in education.  The old ideas on contextual learning, the new understanding of learning from cognitive science and brain-based research, and the information access explosion are individually monumental, but taken together they are geometrically more important than the sum of their parts.

Consider, for instance, the level of understanding that presently exists with respect to the brain.  Experiments that monitor brain activity when responding to visual representations have shown significant differences between adults and teenagers, and, therefore, presumably younger children as well.  Those differences are reflected in the areas of the brain that are engaged in response to the visual stimuli.  Adults tend to use more of the frontal cortex which is where higher-order thinking skills reside, whereas, teens use the amygdala, a more primitive region associated with instinctual responses.  We're not saying that teens are primitive, just that their brains are still in the process of developing higher-order thinking. 

Children's brains are very flexible and are capable of undergoing physical and chemical changes when stimulated positively or negatively.  When that stimuli is absent the development is retarded.   This is particularly important for a child's life up to age 10.  While we can all learn new skills throughout our lives, it is more difficult later than earlier.   This is probably because during the early years a rich environment full of external stimuli helps to develop a more complex web of connections within the brain that establishes a framework for a life-time of learning. 

It is not our intention to embark on an exhaustive review of the literature associated with brain-based learning, but what seems clear is that in order to create learning environments that stimulate higher-order thinking, we first need to understand how a child's brain functions then create situations that promote the kinds of skills-development we desire and minimize the distractions to learning that naturally interfere with the child's focus and attention.  

Some responses to this brain-based understanding have been a move to block scheduling with more emphasis on projects and applied learning, reduced class sizes, more teacher/student contact time and teamwork.  In some cases block scheduling has been used to facilitate longer lecture periods.  Such a response to creative scheduling is a gross injustice to students promulgated by lazy and out-dated educators, and spineless administrators incapable of effective leadership.  If lecturing for 50 minutes produces poor results, then why would lecturing for 80 minutes improve performance? 

By contrast many schools that have instituted creative scheduling have, at the same time, recognized the need for changing what goes on in the classroom.  They have empowered teachers to implement an integrated curriculum approach using real-world projects where students develop academic skills and content, and generic skills, such as team building, respect, and effective communication.  These innovations are supported by the research on brain-based learning which informs us that students must be actively engaged in doing, making, and creating for learning to be effective because these activities increase the persistence of the memory associated with the activity.  They must also feel a sense of safety and structure such that they are able to focus on the tasks at hand. 

This does not mean that rigid control is warranted, but it does mean that complete chaos is just as counterproductive.  Effective and engaging learning that is structured around real world projects can be facilitated through the use of role-playing, team activities, simulations and many other activities.  Such a learning environment will promote the capacity for higher-order thinking, develop the utilization of more advanced regions of the brain and diminish the instinctual, primitive amydalian response.  The attitude and mentality that characterizes the "do whatever feels good" crowd impedes the intellectual development of children by fostering a reliance on primitive reasoning guided by instinct.  While a society may need some of these "edgers" to prevent stagnation, it needs vastly more individuals that have moved further up the intellectual ladder to insure the preeminence of reason and logic.

"When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around"

Everyone recognizes the pressures mandated by content standards and standardized tests reflecting these content areas that have to be endured in order to calculate meaningless measures of performance.  An unfortunate response to these pressures has been the practice of teaching to the test.   As the pressure increases to improve test scores teachers are confronted with the professional dilemma of adopting teaching practices that they know are unproductive for the long term growth of their students, but that will, in the short term, improve their performance on tests.  It has been said that when teachers teach to the test we know that students are at least learning something.  The problem is that even this is not true.

Teaching to the test has so many malicious consequences that it is quite confounding that anyone would advocate it.  For instance, when we teach in this fashion we are discouraging creative thinking because the exercise, by the very nature of its construction, only requires that you arrive at the right answer along a predetermined pathway.

Open-ended problems and real world projects don't neatly fit into the framework of teaching to the test, and, yet, these are the only types of problems that promote higher-order thinking skills, such as creative problem solving and critical thinking.  In Michigan a partial recognition of this has led to modifications in the MEAP test that requires students to perform experiments prior to the test and bring their data with them so they can answer questions relating to that data.  This is an implicit recognition that these tests are meaningless, and that the real reason they are being given has nothing to do with improving the learning of our children and everything to do with political power.  But let's not go there.

Teaching to the test drives the instructional environment in so many ways that run counter to known scholarship about how children and adults learn.  How can a teacher possibly design a learning environment around real world contexts that integrates curricular material and uses performance assessment tools when the goals of teaching to the test are short term retention of unrelated and outdated facts that have no contextual relationship between them.  In fact, if the ultimate assessment is a paper and pencil test it would seem ludicrous to incorporate authentic assessment measures in the process of teaching to the test. 

There is one area where testing is appropriate, namely, immediately following the presentation of content.  It has been shown that the persistence of information retention doubles if students are tested at the end of the period on material just presented.  So as one of many measures of assessment, the strategically placed quiz may be useful.

So why do we teach to the test when it is so well known that it is harming our children?   That would take another book to address all the factors that impact that question.   A better question would be, ‘How should we measure the learning of our children?’  

The answer to this question can be arrived at by examining the answer to another question, ‘What is the primary purpose of education?’  Once you establish that, you will know what you are looking for from an educational system, and this will lead you to the appropriate methods of measuring performance against these criteria.  We have no doubt that once this introspection occurs communities and schools will stop comparing themselves to others in a pointless exercise of who has the highest test scores and will focus on making meaningful learning environments a reality within their own schools.

Our contention would be that the concrete measures that should be taken, after the above self-evaluation has occurred, would include the implementation of project-based, active learning, with real world contexts requiring an integrated curriculum, whose results are measured by authentic assessment methods.  The last thing schools need is to become entangled in more in-services where you are left with nothing practical that can be implemented next Monday.  Identify how you want to promote student learning, train teachers to use methods that promote and assess this learning, and focus your efforts exclusively on this goal.  Every decision should be subject first to the question, ‘How does this facilitate our goal of promoting learning?’  If the answer is that it doesn't, then don't do it. 

"I want to make you understand, I’m talking about a lifetime plan."

Even though the computer will play a major part in education in the future, the challenge for education will still remain the problem of educating real people.  If these future students don't possess the generic skills necessary, they will not find the use of a computer and associated multi-media any more useful and compelling than they found all the lectures they endured during their prior educational experiences.  It is very likely that they will feel even further alienation.  So many futurists seem to assume that every student will somehow have the skills needed to access the bounty of the information revolution, but the falsity of this assumption is evident as one looks about at the everyday lives of people.  Most never possessed the skills needed for the emerging age, and, while intrigued by the technology, most don't feel compelled to participate beyond a universal remote control.  Within this climate the danger is that educators will mistakenly assume that information technology should be used more and more to entertain while educating.  By using educational mega-stars that will deliver exceptionally crafted presentations to hundreds or thousands of on-line subscribers, institutions will maximize productivity and minimize expenses.  If this approach could succeed it would already have happened through videotapes and television, but it didn't succeed because education is not a spectator sport. 

Education requires interaction, application, engagement, motivation, and dedication.  Unless you are the rare individual that possesses these traits naturally, you will need more than a computerized talking head.  You will need a teacher.  However, the image that is conjured up by the word ‘teacher’ will be far different from reality.

In a very interesting study B. S. Bloom reported the 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-on-one Tutoring.  In this study Bloom showed how expert tutoring could produce an improvement of two standard deviations upward over conventional instruction.  This is effectively moving a student from the 50^th percentile to the 98^th percentile, a remarkable achievement.  We should not be surprised by this since it effectively replicates the apprenticeship model which works well in developing skilled practitioners. 

In practice the expert tutor approach would be too costly requiring a personal expert for each student.  However, an appropriately crafted project-based curriculum that facilitates real world connections and consultation with experts has the most promise to achieve comparable gains.  The combined resources of the computer and the teacher acting as a guide and facilitator can create learning situations that replicate the real world and require the location and application of real world resources for skillful problem solving.

Can this kind of learning be achieved solely through the use of well-designed computerized training?  The answer would depend upon who is being trained.  If you are training an adult that has already developed problem solving skills and whose motivation is tied directly to a perceived need, then it may indeed be possible to deliver education solely by computer.  However, if you are dealing with the typical 7-12^th grader there will be varying degrees of capacity to take advantage of the digital resources at hand.  It cannot be assumed that the crucial higher order thinking skills magically appear at a certain age.  The idea that students will, somehow, know how to attack problems, find information, evaluate costs/benefits and feasibility, and measure performance is proven false everyday in classrooms across the nation.  Our goal may be to develop learners that can take advantage of ‘just in time’ learning, but it won’t happen by itself.

The circle of education begins and ends with the teacher and always will.  At the beginning the teacher must develop appropriate learning environments that assist students in constructing knowledge applied to meaningful contexts that require authentic performance assessment criteria for success.  The teacher guides, coaches, facilitates and cajoles the student as they navigate the learning environment.  Through a process of continuous quality improvement, the teacher assesses the progress toward knowledge and skills development.  Continuous iteration around this ever-increasing domain evolves organically from the educational setting of the school to the life setting of the workplace.  The transition is undetectable, unbroken and smooth.

"In a way the sun has shone on me."

If you listen to the technology buffs you'd think that the future of education is to have computer chips implanted directly into your brain.  All the data that you need will be encoded on that chip.  While science fiction has probably been a better prognosticator of the future than the credentialed prophets of academe, this particular futuristic scenario will not spell the doom of education.  Similarly, the information technology explosion will not make it unnecessary to have classrooms.

The reason that classrooms will continue to be a fixture, in one form or another, is that most students do not possess inherently the skills and discipline to motivate their own learning.  We refer to those skills that are concisely described in the SCANS Report and by others.  It is becoming more and more difficult to produce students via traditional means (if it ever was) that are competent critical thinkers, have the capacity to continue to learn, possess the skills to locate and manage resources for problem solving, and are subject area competent.  Why would incorporating information technology within the architecture of today's classroom create results that are measurably different than those that are already being produced?  As the half-life of subject area expertise continues to diminish a worker will find himself having to undergo redesign many times throughout his working life.  Without the capacity to be a perpetual learner, tomorrow's workers will face a bleak future.

However, those that possess the proper skills will find empowerment in the information technology explosion.  These individuals will have the capacity to search, sift, and synthesize information continuously to create knowledge.  They will work seamlessly in teams to analyze problems, seek information, and apply solutions.  These "knowledge navigators" will be "just in time learners".

The learning environment of the future will be characterized by a personalized, interdisciplinary focus developed through collaboration with faculty mentors that understand the student's goals and dominant learning styles.  Progress will be achieved individually and in teams toward learning objectives that connect with the real world and are measured by real world expectations.

The classroom will evolve to effectively teach academic and life skills in an integrated, seamless fashion.  The classroom of the past was ideally suited to the Industrial Age with its structure of well-defined positions and responsibilities within a larger authoritarian organization.  Students were being trained, if not explicitly, to fit into the needs of the Industrial Age society.  The Information Age society demands individuals that can learn, apply information, synthesize knowledge, and solve problems.  Successful Information Age organizations will be more adept at responding to change, but not without workers that possess the requisite skills.  These organizations need individuals that are broadly educated problem solvers that are capable of finding and applying knowledge across a broad range of disciplines.

The current model of learning was quite sufficient when one could learn enough during the early years to carry through the rest of your life.  The half-life of knowledge has shrunken considerably, but there has been no commensurate change in the dominant pedagogy or curriculum.  We still partition learning into units, courses, semesters and degrees, as if the only way that learning can occur is through an accumulation of seat-time.  The needs of the Information Age demand a new learning model that has been called "Just-in-Time" learning, where learning occurs just before it is needed.  Such a model would require a dissolving of the traditional discipline boundaries in such a manner that would make it possible to package learning into components that would fit the learner's needs.  This type of individualized learning would also demand the use and creation of authentic diagnostic tools for measuring performance and attainment of learning goals.  This assessment would be more effective and more comprehensive than the traditional methods of today and would be more outcomes driven than today.

These deliberations highlight the essential need for the current focus on teaching to transform to a devotion to learning.  In the Information Age learning is not separate from work, but rather is fused with it.  In order to survive under the demands of the Information Age, a worker cannot emerge from a learning environment in which the learner is a passive recipient of information.  The appropriate training environment is an active learning environment in which students can develop the necessary skills for the Information Age.  For the future learner, active learning is the only viable choice characterized by just-in-time learning, teamwork, and individually constructed to meet real world demands.  The classroom will not disappear as a result of meeting these needs, but it will transform to something as yet not fully realized.
 

"I'd be more than glad to change my ways for the asking."

A fundamental purpose of education is to provide our children with every opportunity to reach their highest academic potential, to attain the skills of a lifelong learner and a good citizen, and to succeed at their constitutional right of pursuing happiness.  If we fail to provide them with advanced academic skills and knowledge, and generic employability skills we will not have prepared them for the emerging workplace that requires continuous learning and application to meet a rapidly changing world economy. 

In light of these realities we must re-define what a successful education means and how to achieve it.  A successful education must primarily cultivate a child's innate desire to learn.  We believe that resistance to learning is a learned response arising out of situations where some other motive, such as fear, overrides the desire to learn.  Whole brain advocates stress the importance of the 'emotional climate' and the deleterious effects that distress can have by resulting in intellectual 'downshifting'.   There may be many nuances of this overriding motive.  If it is fear, it may manifest itself as a fear that the subject matter is incredibly boring or imponderably difficult, and that you may appear foolish if you just don't get it or don't care.   We realize that this example is rather low on Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, but, let's face it, to get to self actualization you've got to design learning situations where students feel safe to be creative and willing to risk failure for the moment to achieve success overall.

The way to cultivate a child's desire to learn is to create learning situations where learning skills are practiced and refined in a safe environment.   What are these learning skills?  They have been tabulated in many different forms and referred to by many different names, but essentially they are the generic skills needed to make a student capable of life long learning.

Since the release of the SCANS report in 1991 there have been numerous studies and publications relating to the importance of foundational skills development of students.   From the book by Murnane and Levy titled The New Basic Skills to the recent work by MacDermid at Purdue University there is universal consensus that students need an expanded skill set to be successful in the information age.

The foundation of a successful education must be these core standards.  These standards must be imbedded in the design of instruction and assessment as a means of achieving the desired goal of making every student a lifelong learner.  This goal should also be applied to the teachers as well.  What teacher today can say that they don't need to learn anything new?  Were that the case none of us would have bothered to become computer proficient.  In fact, more than ever teachers must be skilled life long learners due to the direct correlation between student achievement and teacher preparedness.  Remember that students will learn best what we model as teachers, so let's show that we are skilled in the art of learning, too.

Teachers are trained and quite proficient at measuring traditional academic knowledge via the usual methods.  In fact, at the edges where art, music, and other performance related subjects lie, teachers have become very skilled at assessment in ways directly related to performance rather than content regurgitation.   However, the primary, and often sole, focus of assessment in both cases is subject matter driven.  This is particularly pervasive in the sciences where students learn a superficial (surface) approach to learning because the assessment instrument of choice emphasizes facts and formulas over a deep meaningful understanding.  When the focus of assessment expands to include generic skills, as well as multidisciplinary academic knowledge and skills, today's teacher is wandering into uncharted territory.  Fear not, we have a map for you.

Insuring the successful incorporation of core standards requires the use of assessment instruments specifically designed to measure those characteristics represented by student that exhibits competency in the core standards.  For instance, when a measure of a person's ability to "solve problems and think skillfully" is desired the evaluator must know and understand the characteristics that would be associated which this skill.  Similarly when a measure of a person's ability ‘to operate successfully as a team member’ is desired the evaluator must be able to identify the appropriate characteristics.

These characteristics that we are referring to must be demonstrable and observable.  For instance, in order to assess whether a student demonstrates the capacity to excel, the teacher may need to measure such characteristics as the ability to accurately self evaluate personal skills, strengths and weaknesses.  Other characteristics may include self-motivation, group motivation, accountability, and tolerance.  There are many other characteristics of an individual that strives for excellence and each of these characteristics can be readily evaluated with the appropriately devised assessment instrument.

Taken together the assessment of the core standards yields a "snap shot" evaluation of that individual's attainment of these important generic skills.  By making an evaluation of these core standards multiple times throughout the duration of a project-based learning experience students and teachers gain information on the dynamic process of continuous improvement toward attaining desirable career and employability skills. 

The evaluation and reporting of the core standards closes the circle of accountability in that the goal of developing the generic skills set has been demonstrated to have been accomplished.  Using the vehicle of project-based, active learning the generic skills have been activated.  Rigorous academic content expectations have been maintained and enhanced through contextual learning activities centered on real world projects.  These represent two distinct learning targets, i.e. generic skills and academic content.  The traditional measure of the latter is subject area grades and standardized test scores.  The generic skills learning target has either been entirely ignored or evaluated postmortem, as it were, at the end of the school year with no opportunity to provide for remediation.  With the inclusion of core standards and appropriate assessment methods this evaluation is constant and connected to facilitate continuous improvement.

Let's consider the evaluation of one of the generic skills as expressed by the SCANS report and included in the core standards of CORD’s Beyond Teaching, namely, the generic skill of “working on teams, teaching others, and working well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds”.  The foundation of a reliable evaluation of a student's progress, toward a high level of mastery of the skills, is an understanding of the characteristics that would be associated with an individual that possesses this generic skill.  The only method a teacher can use to determine whether students are activating these standards is by observing behaviors which are associated with these standards. For instance, to measure a student's progress toward mastering the skill of ‘working well with people’, the teacher must observe whether the student accepts responsibility as a team member, whether the student views the situation from viewpoints other than their own, whether the student is open minded towards team members, and many more characteristics.  You can clearly see that using observation will be one of the most effective methods of collecting data for measuring student progress on attaining this generic skill.

The danger with observation, when used as an assessment technique is that the evaluator will lack organization in the manner of collecting and analyzing data.   The validity of the observational data is often degraded due to failure in recording observations in a timely manner.  With good intentions a teacher may decide to perform an observation of selected students, but the persistent demands on the teacher by other groups of students or teachers can create a delay between the time observations were made and the time these observational impressions were recorded. It then becomes a matter trying to remember exactly what happened during the observation. For this reason the evaluator must learn how to construct and use observation forms.

An example of a structured observation form is presented below. Whenever you decide to utilize structured observation you must be very explicit about what characteristics you will be looking for that correlate with the skill that you are assessing.  It is important to allow yourself sufficient time to prepare the form properly.

Observation Form

Multiple Proficiency Observation of ___________

Student's Name

As you can see this form could be used for evaluating multiple core standards.  Depending upon how many characteristics you want to observe, you may wish to add or delete to the list already provided.  For instance, as you determine the characteristics that correlate with “thinking skillfully” you might want to include multiple characteristics in the observation form if they are amenable to observation or you might decide that some of these characteristics can be identified by examining students' problem logs that are used in conjunction with the project.   However you choose to proceed the most important thing to remember is to be prepared and to know what you are intending to evaluate.

  Once you have established a skill set that forms the foundation for your learning environment, you can proceed to create contextual learning situations that demand mastery of content, as well as generic skills.  A contextual learning situation, by its nature, is multidisciplinary with evaluation based upon real world performance.  The successful education design combines rigorous academic content, generic skills, application oriented projects in real world contexts requiring authentic assessment according to recognized and accepted real world criteria.   Within these well-established confines a student will be motivated to learn the academic content because it is placed in a framework that replicates reality, and they will safely explore the solution space provided by open-ended projects that necessitate thinking 'outside the box'.  The design, in cooperation with students, of criteria for measuring project success develops a degree of ownership by students and an appreciation of expectations with respect to their performance, not only academically, but also behaviorally.  In the successful education of the future, appropriately designed curricula will educate the whole person and provide the reinforcing connections that bring relevance and meaning to the classroom.

"You were only waiting for the moment to be free."

 Probably the hardest thing we've ever done as teachers is to try something new.  We know that the most critical time, which will determine the success or failure of a new initiative, is the first few minutes of the first time you try it.  And if it doesn't go well we know that digging ourselves out of the hole we're in will be more difficult than if we hadn't tried something new at all.  Be strong and very courageous, this stuff really does work.  The same feelings that you have about doing this are the very feelings that the students are experiencing.  We're not promising that it will be automatically easy, but if you pe