No Clich Left Behind: Why Educational Policy Is Not Like the Movies

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No Cliché Left BehindWhy Educational PolicyIs
Not Like the Movies

• Chris Dede
• Harvard University

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The Star Trek Modelof Educational Leadership

• Set a Goal
• Tell Subordinates to Make It So
• Watch as They Use Powerful Technologies(Scientifi
  cally Based Research)to Accomplish This
• Repeat as Needed
• e.g., Governors Goals for Education 2000

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Test to Standard Modelof Educational
Improvement

• Develop content standards based on knowledge and
  skills of disciplinary experts
• Implement high-stakes tests that inexpensively
  document coverage ofthe attainments tests can
  measure
• Reward or punish individual students, teachers,
  schools, and districtsbased on test performance

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Shortfalls in Content Standards

• Twenty-seven years of content to cover in twelve
  years
• Little prioritization of knowledgecentral to
  interrelationships, citizenship,lifelong
  learning
• Teachers use presentational instruction to race
  through facts and recipes
• Curriculum driven by low-level content and skills
  cheaply measured by tests
• Accountability Undercuts Learning

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The Wizard of Oz Modelof Educational
Accountability

• Mandate performance withoutproviding appropriate
  resources
• Drive by summative assessment
• Focus on certificationrather than knowledge
• More Humbug than Magic

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The Bad News about NCLB

• Wrong objectives, ineffective means
• Debt Payment model for compliance
• Attempts to change the function of schools,but
  to keep the same structure (based on sorting)
• Many children held back
• Technology seen as mature rather than emerging
• No resources for technology-based reinvention
• Who Created this Mess?!?

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The Good News about NCLB

• Its more fun to do resurrectionsthan to be a
  pathologist
• Necessity is the Mother of Invention
• Technology offers powerful capabilities,although
  we are struggling to use them well
• We can determine how we make it so
• In politics, fifteen minutes is a long time
• Looking at the Forest rather than the Trees

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Next Generation Curriculum and Learning
Resources

• Curriculum more focused and interrelatedcore
  knowledge and skills
• Pedagogy a mixture of teach and testand
  guided inquiry in virtual communities
• Assessment a mixture of high-stakes tests and
  aggregated diagnostic/formative evaluations
• partnerships for learning in school and out

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Meeting Challenge of Content via Next Generation
Standards

• Beyond a mile wide and an inch deep(as
  documented by TIMSS)
• Beyond recipes and recallto core insights
  mastered deeply
• Beyond discipline-based standardsto 21st century
  work and citizenship
• learning basics in a sophisticated context

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Alternative Pedagogical Models

• guided inquiry learning withactive construction
  of knowledge
• collaborative learningsocial exploration of
  multiple perspectives
• apprenticeship/mentoring relationships
• How People Learn (National Academy Press, 1999)
• http//www.nap.edu/books/0309070368/html

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The Role of Media inNext Generation Education

• channels for sending contentanyplace, on demand
• representational containers fornew types of
  messages
• contexts that empower collaboration
• evolving new kinds of meaning aswe sense and act
  and learnacross barriers of distance and time

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Pedagogical Capabilitiesof Learning Technologies

• facilitating guided, reflective inquiry through
  extended projects thatgenerate complex products
• utilizing modeling and visualization as powerful
  means of bridgingbetween experience and
  abstraction
• involving students in virtualcommunities-of-pract
  ice

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Multi-User Virtual Environment
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Meeting the Challenge of Assessment via Multiple
Measures of Performance

• Five Types of Evidence easiest to hardest
• motivation
• complex content earlier in curriculum
• sophisticated workplace skills
• success for all students
• better outcomes on standardized tests

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Systemic Reform

• Implementation
• transforming standard practices for curriculum,
  pedagogy, assessment, incentives, management and
  organization, professional development, and
  educational research
• achieving success with all students
• involving parents, employers, community,and
  schools as full partnersin the educational
  process
• Transfer of innovationsvia generalization and
  adaptation

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Scaling-Up is the Hardest Part

• from exemplary to typical teachers
• from special funds toinclusion in budget
• from islands of innovation toshifts in
  standard operating practices
• improving organizational climate cultureat
  every level

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Conditions for Successin Technological Innovation

• High-quality learning tools and materials
• Extensive professional development
• Strong technical infrastructure
• Organizational shifts to enabledeeper content,
  powerful pedagogies
• Equity in Content and Servicesas well as Access
  and Literacy
• Stakeholder Involvement

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Dimensions of the Challenge

• Developing educational professionals
• fluent in using new models of contentand
  pedagogy and assessment
• committed to equity through empowermentof
  students and communities
• who can lead the restructuring of schooling via
  using technology to empower learning in and out
  of classrooms

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Meeting the Challenge of Pedagogy via Unlearning

• Developing fluency in usingemerging interactive
  media
• Complementing presentational instruction with
  collaborative inquiry-based learning
• Unlearning almost unconscious assumptions and
  beliefs and values about the nature of teaching,
  learning, andschooling
• crucial issue for professional development

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Providing On-going Supportfor Teachers

• Cohorts of teachers masterwhat they need, when
  they need it
• Partners outside of the schoolwork together with
  educators to share responsibility for students
  learning
• Partners and teachers share a common context for
  expression, collaboration, design
• Virtual communities provide intellectual,
  emotional and social support
• Vital for Recruitment and Retention

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Inquiry Learning Forum
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The Potential ofDistributed Learning

• Sophisticated Methods of Learning and Teaching
• guided construction of knowledge and meaning
• apprenticeships and mentoring
• infusion of research into teaching
• Orchestrated across classrooms, homes,
  workplaces, community settings
• On demand, just-in-time
• Collaborative
• distributed across space, time, media

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My Distributed Learning Course

• http//www.gse.harvard.edu/dedech/502/
• face-to-face interaction
• videoconferencing
• wireless, handheld devices
• small group collaboration via groupware
• synchronous interaction in virtual environment
• asynchronous, threaded discussion
• informal website-based learning experiences
• shells for course authoring
• New Forms of Rhetoric

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Meeting the Challenge of Equity via Empowerment

• Content and services as important as access and
  literacy
• Instructional design for diversity
• Curriculum a mix of national standardsand local
  objectives
• Diagnostic assessment interwoven witha wide
  range of pedagogies
• Individual Empowerment, not Indoctrination

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Evolving to Next GenerationSystemic Improvement

• Content increasingly interrelated,centered on
  core knowledge and skills, linked to prioritized
  standards,based on students personal
  experiences
• Pedagogy increasingly based onguided inquiry in
  communities of practice
• Assessment increasingly diagnostic, accumulative

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Four Generations ofInstructional Technology

• 0th Generation Why Bother?
• 1st Generation Silver Bullet
• 2nd Generation Automation
• 3rd Generation Innovation
• Towards Genuine LeadershipBased on Federal
  Partnership

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