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Commentary On CNN’s “Don’t Fail Me: Education In America”

janoszd — Tue, 17 May 2011 01:08:29 +0000

The CNN special report “Don’t Fail Me: Education In America” originally aired on CNN on May 15, 2011. The report chronicled three students and teams engaged in the FIRST Robotics Competition during the 2010-11 school year. Below are some of my thoughts on the documentary.

FIRST
Let me clearly state that I am a strong supporter of FIRST programs. I have coached a FIRST Tech Challenge team and since the program was first rolled out in New Jersey several years ago, I actively partnered and promoted FIRST programs by way of my involvement in my state professional association, the NJTEA. FIRST students work hard on developing and applying their ingenuity in a meaningful context. It might sound as if I am critical of the program in some of my remarks, but make no mistake that FIRST is at the very least one of the programs on the right track. Yet, as one analyzes the teams pictured as participants in the FIRST Robotics Program in Don’t Fail Me, several interesting things come to light.

FIRST teams in schools are comprised of about twenty students. FIRST reports that in 2011, they are reaching 66,875 students with their high school programs. Let’s dig a little deeper into that number because it sounds like a lot. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are about 26 million secondary school students in the United States. So, FIRST, a program which most consider to be wildly successful, is now reaching only about 0.25% of American high school students. Even if there was a FIRST robotics team in every one of America’s 41,000+ secondary schools, with only twenty students on each team, this program would be for only about 3% of American high school students.

The other thing that might strike you is the makeup of the FIRST teams themselves. In photos of teams of just over twenty students, I counted only three and four girls on each of the teams pictured. Let’s put that against some of the numbers mentioned previously. Assuming that the teams pictured are indicative of female participation in FIRST programs, and based on my research and involvement with this issue in the state of New Jersey I have no reason to think this is not at least in the ballpark, this means that FIRST programs are reaching only 0.08% of all female high school students in the United States!

INSANITY

I was surprised and somewhat pleased to see a former prominent public official in former Governor of Tennessee Phil Bredesen speak so frankly to a wide public audience about the insanity of the accountability system we employ in statewide testing. I conclude from his comments and CNN’s analysis that any data presented by any state education institution can be considered invalid.

I also believe that this is closely linked to another thing I noticed in Don’t Fail Me. Pretty much any time you saw anyone teaching mathematics, it was as we all remember it; it was an overhead projector with the teacher writing on it; it was students doing math problems on the board in front of the class. The relationship I would point out is this: The insanity of the testing and accountability system in place in educational institutions is perpetuating us in the same stale, demonstrably ineffective instructional practices that have lead us to where we find ourselves today. Ask any teacher in a tested subject and they will tell you clearly that they know that how they are teaching does not hold up in what research shows as effective. They basically will tell you that they do know better, but that they teach this way because of the test for which they are preparing students.

After all, Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We are clearly epitomizing his definition in the tested “core academic” subjects and this is done at the expense of programs that can deliver authentic learning experience such as those that FIRST and other technology and engineering programs in schools provide.

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I am thankful to CNN and Soledad O’Brien for taking up the effort to try to raise awareness about some of the issues that they brought to light in Don’t Fail Me. But, call it cautiously thankful since I know that so much more needs to be done. If we want to do more, we don’t need another robotics competition. We need a strong, rigorous, scalable program institutionalized in American schools that can reach every student, not just a few. My colleagues and I are working on a plan to do just that and I look forward to sharing our ideas in the near future.

William Kamkwamba

janoszd — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:04:32 +0000

The first time I heard of William Kamkwamba was when he appeared on the Daily Show back in October 2009, shortly after his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was published. To hear even a brief part of the story about how William had constructed a wind powered turbine in his village in Malawi set me out to buy the book. I remember him pondering during the interview, “where was Google all this time?” To read the entire book, however, set me out to change my perspective on student motivation among some other ideas related to ingenuity.

William had started to develop the wind turbine at age fourteen. But, more interesting than that were the events that led up to that point in time. Not every child in Malawi goes to school. William was one that understood the opportunity he had when his family was able to enroll him in a primary school. He was a hard worker in school and seems to have appreciated every bit of knowledge that came his way through his formal education experience.

By about the time he finished the eighth grade in 2001-02, severe famine had struck the country. His family, being agrarian, could no longer support the fees required for William to keep attending school. The book describes in great detail how William and his family got through those two years, surviving on just a few bites of food, if even that, per day.

The first thing we can learn from William’s story is about motivation. The severe famine that had hit and the hunger pains he literally felt made him wonder about solutions to the problem. He thought that if he could find a way to irrigate the crops that he could help solve the problem. But, to do that you’d need power to pump the water. So, William was more motivated to solve a problem than perhaps anyone could possibly be.

When William set out to learn about energy and power he came across several textbooks on related topics. I think many people miss the true genius of William. It wasn’t as if the text materials he read contained a set of plans that explained how he could build a wind turbine from materials laying around a village in a developing country. What William did was he applied the sort of ingenuity I wish every one of our children could develop. He read about the concepts and then set out to find the things that fit his needs…an old bicycle dynamo to serve as the generator…old automobile parts and metal garnered from trips to the scrap yard…some other tools and parts from his father’s farming materials and others from around the house. From these “unusable,” even in a developing country, items he fashioned a full power generation system complete with a circuit breaker. Imagine the pride and delight he must have felt when the family radio powered up for the first time with electricity from his wind turbine.

Our young people can learn a lot from an individual like William Kamkwamba and the stories he has to tell. I’d say the book is definitely appropriate for a high school level student on up through adults.

You can also learn more about William in his own words from this TED Talk and this short documentary called Moving Windmills.

Temple Grandin

janoszd — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:05:25 +0000

Until recently, I had never heard of Dr. Temple Grandin, but a friend and colleague who had seen the HBO movie about her encouraged me to see it. I was intrigued by the idea of the person who thinks in pictures and was credited with revolutionizing an entire industry with her ingenious designs. I also had met some students over the years that had high-functioning autism or Aspergers that had taken one or more of my technology education classes. At that time, I didn’t understand why the child study team and parents and students felt like my classes would be a good fit.

Dr. Grandin’s most well-known technological achievement is the ingenious design of sweeping curving corrals for animals being moved to slaughter. Above all this design demonstrates her understanding of ethics and social responsibility, which is important for all young people to understand. The design also demonstrates a high understanding of technological systems and how their component parts interact.

Dr. Grandin also understands her own strengths and challenges. In light of her autism, she needed to learn how to communicate the great ideas that she was easily able to visualize (see her book Thinking In Pictures). Actually drawing her ideas was something that she needed to work hard to learn and develop. Further, as she was challenged to communicate verbally, she needed to learn how to sell and pitch her ideas in drawings much more than words.

I really appreciate what Dr. Grandin has to say in her TED talk about how we are losing the importance of hands on courses in our schools. My feeling is that the pendulum has swung way too far in favor of traditional education and associated standardized testing that was designed for the turn of the 20th Century.

Our students can learn a lot from the ingenuity of Dr. Grandin and we need to work on developing the understandings she has of systems, ethics, and communication in our young people. The movie is appropriate for a high school audience and our future teachers can take a lot from reading and viewing her materials.

Think Like a Kindergartner

janoszd — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 01:20:30 +0000

One of the keys to developing one’s ingenuity is to give your mind the opportunity to think creatively and invoke the good ole’ KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) concept, or just think like a kindergartner.

The other day I took my five-year-old son over to basketball practice, which happens to take place at the school he goes to every day. This is always a big event for the family and we usually take two cars just for comfort’s sake as we now have three children. As we were leaving the building and headed toward our car I started wondering about my son’s sense of direction. Had he developed it yet? How far could he get in his thinking this way? Could he direct me which way to drive and turn in order to get us all the way home (which is maybe a half-mile or so with just a few turns)? Does he know “the best way” to get home? Could he possibly know alternative ways to get home?

So, after we got ourselves and our things packed into the car and ready to go, I turned on the car and decided to ask him, “Can you tell me how to get home from here?” I just love the answer I got back. He said, “Yea! You see that car right over there? That’s Mommy. Follow her.”

As we’ve fallen in our society toward schooling our children rather than educating them, we kill their creativity, as Sir Ken Robinson points out so nicely in this TED talk. As my friend, author, informal educator, and former engineer, Harry Roman says, “we tend to cure curiosity of our children” rather than giving them experiences that are designed to encourage and develop it. Though we’d like to think schools have overcome this, especially high schools, they have not. Yes, it is true that schools and instructional practices are still so much like they always have been and are probably not too far from what you may remember.

Creative thinking is one of the cornerstones and keys to ingenuity and it takes time and experience to make sure our kids either don’t lose it in the first place or help them get it back. To do this we have to provide coursework and experiences and activities to our kids that make sense and that is designed to develop creativity and ingenuity.

What are some other examples of being able to think like a kindergartner? What are some ways to teach older children to keep thinking like a kindergartner? What types of activities are best for developing creative thinking?