The need for STEAM

I will now give fair warning...I am going to get on a soapbox for this post.

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/115/316350341_00239c8fc2_z.jpg?zz=1
 

I was reading through my Zite feed and found this post on how at the heart of every Pixar animation is a computation engine designed with the rules of geometry and physics. This just reinforces that idea to me that schools need to focus on more than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) career pathways and redefine them as STEAM (add Art) career pathways.

The POTUS has put a lot of money and policy (Race to the Top) behind the creation of these new STEM career pathways to create a new supply of trained and educated workers for these career fields. Primarily, the major need for these fields is due to the retirement of workers after the last push for these career fields from the Sputnik scare of 1957. With the idea that the Russians were able to create and successfully orbit and artificial satellite during the escalation of the Cold War, Americans had to ensure that we would be second to no one. This resulted in a huge push for more scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, and President Kennedy's decree that we would reach the moon by the end of the decade (1960s).

With it now being 2013, all of those engineers, scientists, and mathematicians have had a very successful 30+ years in the field and are now retiring in droves. As we push forward, we have to recognize that the world has radically changed since 1957.

I was very fortunate to experience a very well rounded education when I was in high school. I had the chance to explore visual as well as performance art in addition to my studies of science, math, and the humanities. I joke with people that I was much smarter when I was in high school because I was able to discuss topics of biology, chemistry, physics, history, literature, and others. Once I went to college, I chose a major and focused on the study of biology and my working knowledge of the other subjects went by the wayside. But, again, I was fortunate to still have the chance to continue a personal pursuit of vocal performance with the Varsity Men's Glee Club and an a cappella group, No Strings Attached.

It is this well rounded education that has enriched my life and my work in education. But a big part of that is that the pursuit of biology, education, and vocal performance were my passions. Educators and policy makers are pushing these STEM career pathways into 6th and 7th grade. As students move through these pathways year to year, it will become progressively difficult to alter pathways the later they go in the schooling. Should we be asking students to select a career pathway in 6th grade?

And why this push? Our test scores are low, compared to other nations. So, how do we fix this? Test more and narrow focus. What happens when a student's passions are not found within STEM? What happens when students grow and develop and their passions change?

If we are able to evolve STEM into STEAM, that would at least provide more students options and open more pathways to students who already like the STEM careers.

Case in point, a friend of mine had quite a bit of talent in the sciences, but she also had a lot of talent in drawing, which is where her passions were (as she was graduating college). Luckily enough, she had good educators around her to guide her to her career in medical illustration. Just as the Pixar article suggested, within the arts, STEM is already present, but not necessarily a conscious part of the career choice process.

Additionally, recent conversations I have had with various colleagues and friends have mentioned how their ability to express themselves, in both written and verbal formats, have allowed them to advance and collect more grant dollars than any of their subject specific trainings. Despite their lack of formal testing under NCLB, the arts need to be emphasized and encouraged.

Education needs to move full STEAM ahead.

DRIPs can lead to good conversation

This post is a commentary on the shifts that are needed in schools in order to make the role of a data coach more effective.

The shift that I will comment on is this:

• Optional data discussions need to become essential parts of teaching and learning

If you aren't familiar with the acronym, DRIP stands for Data Rich, Information Poor. This tends to be a common problem found in schools. Schools collect so much data (student achievement, attendance, tardies, discipline, etc) that before you get results from one data collection, you are already looking to collect a new set. There seems to be no time to desegregate the data and get to the meaning of it. In the rare occasions that there is a chance to look at the meaning of the numbers, often it is an autopsy with little chance to make mid-course corrections. If this is our only experience looking at data for meaning, we may make the mistake the the data is an ending point and we just move on.

I had the chance to attend and present at the ESEA/NCLB conference in Chicago yesterday. At the luncheon, we listened to the keynote address of Dr. Robert Meyer from UW Madison. He has worked with multiple large urban school districts to develop the value-added model for student achievement. He had stated the educator effectiveness can be measured using multiple data sources, including student growth, instructional observations, and student surveys (would this include data from the 5Essentials survey?). He also recommended that you check out the Measurements of Effective Teaching from the Gates Foundation.

I think one of the best thing stated in this keynote address was his recognition that NCLB fails to recognize that when a student enters your classroom 4 grade levels below expectations and leaves only 2 grade levels below that the teacher has been effective. NCLB only looks at the benchmark score of readiness and, regardless of any growth, if you didn't hit that benchmark, you didn't do anything. The value-added model can make corrections to this error in reporting.

Meyer stated that it is meant to be teacher friendly and supportive for new teachers. Essentially, value-added is a statistical model that can separate out external factors that might lead to student growth and narrow in on the effect of the teacher. It takes the results of the previous year's assessment and will predict what the student will score in the current year. The value-added comes in when the student scores higher than what was predicted and thus, indicated the effectiveness of the teacher.

If it will work that way, great...

The other thing that Dr. Meyer stated that was beneficial is that the data report is the beginning of inquiry and not the answer to a question.

This fed right into my presentation about digital classroom walkthroughs. Walkthroughs are a great method of collecting instructional data and providing good and timely information to teachers and buildings to make mid-course corrections from the difference between our perceptions of what goes on in the classroom and what is really happening.

We have used walkthroughs for over 4 years now and when the information is presented to the staff, they begin asking questions...this is the key! They take what is now know through observations and attempt to make instructional changes in order to get more desirable results. The examination of the data leads to great questions in a non-threatening manner because individual teachers are not named. When we share the data, it is aggregate for the school or department.

You want the buck to stop? Stop passing it then!

This post is a commentary on the shifts that are needed in schools in order to make the role of a data coach more effective.

The shift that I will comment on is this:

• Individual accountability needs to shift to collective responsibility

As I was perusing my Twitter feed today, I came across a blog post that was titled This is how democracy ends -- Apology from a former teacher. It was posted by Lisa Nielsen, but was written by Kris L. Nielsen. The title caught my eye because I am a Star Wars fan and I had written a post about the Citizens United decision with a similar title.

As I read through Kris's accounting of the influences on modern education (Common Core, Textbook companies, Foundations (i.e. Gates, Wal-Mart), and politicians) and how it is trying to make everyone fit a cookie cutter mold and that schools will become the factories of which their design was based, I could not help but shudder at the thought of this bleary educational future.

I will respectfully disagree that the Common Core is one of the signs of an impending apocalypse. Working in Illinois, where the previous set of standards were a mile wide and inch deep, the Common Core has a lot of positive potential effects to education, if teachers and administrators only had to worry about implementing the new standards instead of making sure that every student does well on the ACT (Day 1 of the 2 day test mandated by NCLB for Illinois). Unfortunately, the latter is more the case than the former, so I can see what Kris's point is getting at.

Having, personally, eagerly awaited the release of the Next Generation Science Standards, I have a good understanding of the effort of educators who wrote these standards in an effort to directly improve instruction by narrowing the focus to the skills needed perform science at all levels--not merely focusing on a content area, but its connection to other concepts, how science and engineering work together, and a development of critical thinking skills. The Common Core for mathematics and English/Language Arts had many of the same goals.

How does all of this relate back to the needed shift? My other posts related to the shifts that are needed to make an instructional coach effective have been directed at the activities of the coaches, teachers, and administrators. I have discussed the removal of teacher isolation and that will assist with a sense of collective responsibility. Kris makes a very valid point about how all of these outside influences are pushing and pulling on education to squeeze it through a play dough mold. What made me connect his blog post with this shift if who is the individual responsible?

With all of those outside influences, the amazing (scary) thing is that the individual that the outside influences, parents, general community always talk about is the classroom teacher. I agree with what Marzano says about the teacher being one of the largest influences on the learning that the student will do in the classroom, but again, the shearing forces of those outside influences might rip that apart.

With all of the politicians, foundations, and corporations (who must have attended school therefore they know how a school should work) exerting direct influence into the classroom, I think that those people should shift from the individual responsibility of the teacher to a collective responsibility that if we want the entire nation to improve, then we are ALL in this together! It seems like politicians all want to quote Truman and have the buck stop right on the teacher's desk. I say that they need to stop passing the buck.

What is the right number to measure?

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I had the chance to watch the movie Moneyball again. If you haven't seen it, the trailer is below:

The movie is based on a book by Michael Lewis, which was based on real events of the Oakland Athletics who took an obscure 1964 book (Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook) written about baseball statistics to "change the way the game is played". Essentially, the A's wanted to look at statistics and data that would directly result in winning more games by scoring more runs by getting more players on base...didn't matter how it happened.

It wasn't until this morning, when I received a tweet from Brenda Colby to check out an article  written by Michael Brick, titled "When 'Grading' Is Degrading". As usual, something from my tweeps got me thinking. :)

NCLB, for better or worse, has radically altered the way that the public views its schools and the ways that schools are being measured as successful (or not). Schools now take a look at their results from previous years and with their practice testing try to accurately predict how students will perform and what 'grade' the school will receive. I read the article, which mirrors multiple conversations I have had online and face to face about the meaning of the test scores, and thought to myself, "What is the right number to measure?"

If you watched the trailer, you heard one of the scouts actually equate the beautiful-ness of a baseball player's girlfriend to his idea of self-confidence and whether that player will make a positive addition to the organization. This seems to be a bit of a stretch of logic to me, but the scout, who brings the 150 years of past practice, states that this way of doing things is valid and works. It also seems to me that measuring a school's success on set of test scores seems just as illogical. So again, "What is the right number to measure"?

As I was exploring the Brick article, I came across an older article on www.schoolleadership20.com with a powerful statement right at the beginning of it:

"Data itself has no meaning, until it is organized and displayed in charts or graphs that can be interpreted, usually in multiple ways. These interpretations may usefully inform our dialogue, decisions and subsequent actions so data definitely can be valuable, but it often seems to be granted undue reverence simply because it is numerical. Although insight can derive from analysis of data, equally it can arise out of intuition and, in fact, I wonder if some analyses are not actually rationalizations subconsciously imposed on data to justify intuitive speculations." (Beairsto, 2010) (Taken from http://www.schoolleadership20.com/profiles/blogs/don-t-let-data-drive-your-dialogue-by-dr-bruce-beairsto)

As someone who is trying to move from autopsy data to predictive data, are we just seeing what we want to see or what past experience has told us? I completely agree with Beairsto that we need to triangulate data points to get more meaning and that we must value a qualitative research paradigm to get at the underlying meaning of what the numbers say. Especially as teacher evaluations, under Race to the Top, will bring in elements of student achievement to a teacher's rating, we need to be able to triangulate our numbers to derive meaning. But, just as FOX and MSNBC can look at data and come to completely different conclusions, what will happen when teacher unions and administrators differ on the conclusions from the data?

As we look globally, to the success of schools, school districts, and the American education system, What are the right numbers to measure?

Standardized Testing...the new game show?

Today was a bit of a tough day. I had a good day at my new campus and spent the second half of the day cleaning out my office in my old campus. While I do not have computer in my new office yet, I do not get the chance to do my digital learning during the day. So, I came home today from my first week in my new position and had a chance to read contributions to my learning from my PLN. Vicki Davis shared this video on Google+:

 If you watch the video, the contestant admits that it is challenging to "do math sitting here [in the hot seat]". Having been on a televised game show myself, I can be sympathetic to the "hot seat" phenomenon. Having said that, it reminds me of the high pressure situation that we put our students in late April for our NCLB mandated test, the Prairie State Achievement Exam.

For those of you not familiar with the Illinois test, it is a two day test comprised of the ACT (day 1) and the Work Keys plus and Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) developed Science assessment. The scores from these two days of testing are mysteriously calculated into cuts scores to determine if juniors in high school meet or exceed state standards. Amazingly, Illinois uses a test (the ACT) for NCLB that is DESIGNED to sort students and leave some behind. But I digress...we can discuss standardized assessment at a later date.

It seems that NCLB gives schools 1 chance to "hit it big", like on a game show. The trouble is that as schools have to play the game to get students ready make it through the test the mathematics for this question is reduced to a trivia fact. There is no thought about Pythagoras and the 3-4-5 triangle that could generate a great discussion about mathematics and numeracy. I hope that as the CCSS take effect and change mathematics teaching in the early grades, there will be deeper understanding of the mathematics and we can change the game show created by NCLB.

Will high school math classes change form Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2/Trig to Math 1, 2, 3 and 4 with thoroughly integrated topics? Will students come into high school with better understanding of the fundamentals of math to spur deeper understanding in high school? Will there be better assessments that come with PARC?

We will have to wait and see. Until then...BIG BUCKS, NO WHAMMIES!