Networked Improvement Communities: the Time is Right for the Ties that Bind</h1> <article> <h1>Networked Improvement Communities: the Time is Right for the Ties that Bind</h1> <p>Gary Otake — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:03:53 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-thumbnail"> <div class="field-label">Thumbnail: </div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> </div> </div> </div> <p> <em>Carnegie Senior Partner Louis Gomez explores the tools and routines of networked communities for educational improvement.</em></p> <p> <br /> <a href="/about-us/staff/louis-gomez">Louis M. Gomez</a> is a Senior Partner at Carnegie, working with Carnegie President Tony Bryk on R&D field building. He is also the inaugural holder of the Dr. Helen S. Faison Chair in Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh and the first director of the University’s Center for Urban Education.</p> <p> This interview between Gomez and Carnegie's Communications Director, Gay Clyburn, was held in January when the foundation, working with the Knowledge Alliance, brought together a mix of doers and thinkers with aspirations to improve education for all students. The meeting, "Towards Building Knowledge Networks for Innovation and Improvement," continued a partnership between the two organizations to further a re-engineering of educational research and development.<br /> </p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p> <b>GAY:</b> Many are saying that we are at an unprecedented moment in time for innovation in education because of the Obama Administration’s investment and attention. This seems to indicate that a quick response is expected and needed. In fact, I heard Jim Shelton (Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the Department of Education) speak at a recent conference on education renovation and he ended his remarks with, "shame on you if you let this moment pass." What does that mean for organizations tackling problems of practice right now?<br /> <br /> <b>LOUIS:</b> This is a very important moment in time that, like Jim Shelton said, we shouldn't allow to pass without making progress. The big "but" is that we need more than just aspiration. We need concrete and actionable advances to make it happen.</p> <p> <b> GAY:</b> Undergirding Carnegie's approach to our current new work are six core principles about how applied research and development might more productively engage educational improvement. These are:</p> <ul> <li> Anchor R&D efforts around important, specific and measurable improvement problems;</li> <li> Recognize that improvements at scale on complex educational problems entail sustained, coordinated efforts across diverse sources of expertise;</li> <li> Affirm the power of practical design, educational engineering, and development activity (DEED) for advancing continuous improvements over time;</li> <li> Acknowledge that the formation of such an intentionally-designed network of expertise entails not only new ways of working, but also new norms for practice;</li> <li> Embrace a performance improvement ethic where change efforts are guided by a common analytic framework that is constantly tested and revised against emerging evidence about what is and is not working, for whom, and under what set of circumstances; and</li> <li> Exploit the capacities of open resources both to accelerate innovation development and the rapid diffusion of demonstrated effective practices.</li> </ul> <p> <br /> I want to focus on the fourth principle, what we're now calling Networked Improvement Communities since this was, in fact, what the Knowledge Alliance convening at Carnegie was all about. What are the responsibilites of individuals or organizations working within a networked community and what would be some of the new norms for practice and the new ways of working and how might this way of working connect with the national call for innovation?</p> <p> <b>LOUIS:</b> We start from the conjecture that such networks have at least three key components:</p> <p> First, they have an on-the-job-floor layer where the activity actually occurs.</p> <p> The second component is an information system or feedback component, which is best thought of as the layer where information about first-layer activities is collected in order to improve them. We will need to understand what data and social practices (e.g., regular meetings) allow the organization to improve its current operations.</p> <p> The third layer is an innovations component, where, based on activity in layers one and two, the work of the job floor is problematized and re-conceptualized. For example, a Networked Improvement Community might rethink work activity because an external innovation, such as a new technology, makes some part of the job-floor operation obsolete. Alternatively, activity may begin to occur under new rules that open up possibilities for new structures, as is the case with charter schools. We are working to understand the organizational tools and social practices that encourage NICs to accomplish the tasks in these three layers.</p> <p> Attention must also be paid to the social organization which gets a diverse set of actors to the same table in the first place, and allows them to sustain engagement in the work in mutually beneficial ways. The networked activity implied in the process described above requires collaboration across practitioners, institutional leaders, educational designers and educational researchers; groups that are often unaccustomed—and unrewarded—for working together. For a variety of reasons (outlined by Bryk, 2007; Schoenfeld 2009), the incentives and work structure for each of these groups creates a number of barriers, preventing the creation of viable, effective network relationships.</p> <p> These barriers are not insurmountable, however, but they require careful consideration and ultimately management. Networked forms of organization are becoming more common in the age of information and along with them an emerging literature on the unique management challenges they entail. In particular, networked organizations cannot depend on typical communication channels, coordination of work activities and accountability/authority/decision-making responsibilities arrangements (Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004; Podolny & Page,1998). Networked Improvement Communities, and the diverse colleagueship of participants they entail, also require new ways of achieving these capabilities. And they will need new forms of social organization and tools to allow them to do so.</p> <p> <b>GAY:</b> Why do you think that educational research and development is not working together this way now and how hopeful are you that we can engage this kind of collaborative environment going forward?<br /> <br /> <b>LOUIS:</b> I think there are a lot of reasons, one is what Tony (Bryk) often refers to as the "political economy of the academy." A lot of the work that fuels new learning in education comes from the academy and the kind of work that Schoenfeld and Tony and I; Jim Stigler and his colleague James Hiebert and others have argued for, involves taking an engineering-like perspective to big and challenging problems. The dominant research community that has fueled a lot of what we know today as an ethic of individual and uncoordinated work, where the value system has been all about rewarding individuals for bright insights and not so much about rewarding individuals, or groups of individuals, for not just coming up with valuable and provocative insights but also for driving them in practice so that they become useful and usable.</p> <p> The corporate sphere also fuels much of what we do. There's always been an ethic of competition rather than coordination where you could have coordinated but competitive development. For example, in the open resources world, I think people recognize that while part of the value is in the technical things we create, a huge part of the value is also in the services that surround these, that allow them to be then used in schools and other places. To complete the three-legged stool, practitioners who have huge reservoirs of valuable and insightful knowledge tend to lock that knowledge up in individual classrooms, with no mechanism to be shared. Therefore, the wisdom of practice is not aggregated, not publicly vetted, and it never escapes individual schools and classrooms. So, I think that the social norms of the major stakeholder communities that fuel this kind of work mitigate against the formation of something like a Networked Improvement Community.</p> <p> Collaboration and coordination are perennial themes in discussions of organizational improvement. Business literature is chock-full of examples where failures to collaborate and failures to coordinate within and across organizations lead to inefficiencies and sub-optimal outcomes. While the need to improve collaboration and coordination is pervasive, it is perhaps nowhere more starkly needed than in the practice of education. Educational practice is legend for its silo-ed nature. It is long overdue that educational designers should pay attention to techniques and tools that can realign education work systems so that action is more coordinated. It is this need that lies at the heart of the work that Carnegie hopes to seed. We are encouraged that a focus on creating educational Networked Improvement Communities—and exploring the tools and routines that might enliven these—can lead to educational practice that has a better chance of making more rapid and significant progress on some of the high-leverage problems that face teaching and learning communities today. </p> </article> <article> <h1>Developing the Potential of All Students</h1> <p>Gary Otake — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:02:14 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-thumbnail"> <div class="field-label">Thumbnail: </div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> </div> </div> </div> <p><em>An interview with Professor of Education at Stanford University Guadalupe Valdés on the challenges of teaching English language learners. </em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p><a href="/about-us/staff/guadalupe-valdes">Guadalupe Valdés</a> is a senior partner in the Carnegie Network, advising the Foundation in its new work, especially on issues around students who are English language learners. She has written that “as American educators we have a choice, we can isolate English-language learners in our educational institutions or we can choose to develop the full intellectual potential of all our citizens and future citizens.”</p> <p>As Carnegie begins its work on increasing the success of developmental mathematics students in community colleges, understanding the characteristics of the students is an important component. The Foundation recruited Valdes, who is one of the most eminent experts on Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States, to shed light on the teaching and learning challenges with this segment of the student population. She is currently the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University.</p> <p>Valdés was interviewed by Carnegie Communications Director Gay Clyburn.</p> <h2>A different way to think about teaching English language learners</h2> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> You are collecting information for us on “non-English-background” students in community colleges. Why? <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> It is a population of students that we can’t overlook. I want to make the point that there is no typical ELL student. I’m using the term “non-English-background students.” These are:</p> <ul> <li>U.S.-born students who grew up in homes where a non-English language was spoken</li> <li>Foreign-born students who grew up in the U.S., who were educated in this country, and who also grew up in homes where a non-English language was spoken</li> <li>Newly arrived immigrant students who were schooled in other countries</li> <li>International students</li> </ul> <p> This category of students includes students of many ethnic backgrounds with various linguistic backgrounds and proficiencies, making it difficult to design courses or programs for any one student. These are students who speak only English (although members of their family may speak a non-English language), students who speak English and their home language, and students who are in the process of learning English.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> This sounds complicated. <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> Linguistic proficiencies are very complicated. Some students who are monolingual in English may speak heavily accented English. This often results in their being characterized as English-language learners. Some students who speak both English and their home language may still exhibit some limitations in listening, speaking, reading and writing English. Other students are clearly English language learners who are in the process of acquiring the language.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> Do these students represent a large percentage of the community college student population? <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> They do. The American Association of Community Colleges reports that minority students constitute 30 percent of community college enrollments nationally, with Latino students representing the fastest-growing racial/ethnic population. Think about these statistics alongside the fact that community colleges serve almost half the nation’s undergraduates. These are gateway institutions. And the completion statistics are tragic. In a 1988-2000 sample of students who entered higher education through a community college with the expectation of completing a B.A., only 15 percent of Hispanics (compared to 26 percent of whites and 9 percent of blacks) had completed the degree by the year 2000.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> What is the scope of the mathematics and language project you’re doing for Carnegie? <br /> <strong>Valdés</strong>: I’m examining the ways in which language proficiency is related to mathematics achievement. I’m initially looking at the literature and I am collecting data from three California community colleges. I hope that this information will provide a snapshot of non-English-background students and the broader challenges they face in community colleges.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> Are you finding that there is a lot of information available. <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> Not really. Most of the work on math and language has not focused on community college students and has not disentangled language proficiency from ethnicity, socioeconomic status, use of non-standard dialects and other social and cultural variables.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> So, what’s missing? What do we need to think about as we look at teaching developmental math in community colleges to non-English learners? <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> We need to be aware of the role of language limitations in the study of mathematics. We need to look at instructional delivery systems, both face-to-face and online. We need to look at text materials, classroom activities and assessment systems. Little information has been collected on students’ language characteristics and on the relationship between these characteristics and their success and/or failure in particular academic departments and courses.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> How are you getting at this information in your study? <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> We’re talking to administrators, faculty and students. We’re asking administrators to talk to us about their perception of Latino students, policies that might impact the students and factors that might affect student success. We’re asking instructors to tell us about the classes they teach, about Latino students and their performance in their classes, factors that account for that performance, the language proficiencies of Latino students, and particular topics that they consider “language laden.” And we’re talking to students about their experiences in studying math and in a typical math class, their performance in math classes, their use of support services, their experience with assessments and the placement process, the language background, and the impact of their language proficiencies on the learning of mathematics.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> What are you finding? <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> We’ll know more when the study is completed, but initially we’re finding that administrators and faculty have little awareness about how ESL policies and developmental math policies might interact. Two colleges have multi-level ESL course sequences required before students can enroll in the regular English multi-level developmental sequences. That’s asking students to do a lot of work before they can even take a college credit-level course. We’re also finding that administrators, faculty and students have different explanations for students’ low achievement in developmental math—none of them related to instruction. And not surprisingly, students express doubt and concerns about their English. Word problems in mathematics are especially challenging for ESL students.</p> <p><strong>Clyburn:</strong> Based on what you know now, what needs to happen to reverse the statistics, to ensure success in mathematics classes for non-English background students in community colleges? What do we need to do differently? <br /> <strong>Valdés:</strong> There are no easy answers to this problem. And there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. The first thing we have to do is to have more accurate information about students’ backgrounds, both educational and linguistic. We need to press for the use of better assessment and placement procedures. We also need to press for more communication between academic departments (e.g. mathematics departments) and faculty and staff who are knowledgeable about language development. We need to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which computer mediated materials might interact with the reading and writing abilities of English language learners</p> </article> <article> <h1>Strengthening the Foundations of Students' Excellence, Integrity and Social Contribution</h1> <p>Gary Otake — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:58:44 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Anne Colby and William M. Sullivan </div> </div> </div> <p><em>Rather than treat analytical thinking, along with mastery of substantive content, as </em>sufficient<em> goals for higher education, the authors remind us that colleges should aim to teach students how to use knowledge and criticism not only as ends in themselves, but as means toward responsible engagement with the life of their times.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>College education is a highly formative experience. It proves eventful and life-shaping for students of any age. College provides a uniquely powerful moment in which students rethink their lives, expand their intellectual and cultural horizons, and focus on future goals, often in new ways. Yet, we suspect that when they reflect on their time in higher education, many graduates feel a gnawing sense that something important was missing, that the overall educational experience could have been more helpful in enabling them to come to grips with their lives. </p> <p>In their catalogues and advertising, universities and colleges frequently speak of preparing their graduates to live discerning and responsible lives. This is especially true of institutions that lay claim to a heritage of liberal education. But few institutions of higher learning devote significant curricular attention to questions of purpose, vocation or personal meaning. Why is this so? We believe that this neglect of direction, meaning and other aspects of personal responsibility as serious educational goals is the unintended consequence of too narrow a pursuit of higher education's most cherished value: analytical thinking.</p> <p>Analytical thinking involves making sense of particular events in terms of general concepts and then manipulating those concepts according to general rules or principles. Analytical thinking involves framing the particularity of actual experience in terms of categories at a higher level of abstraction. This is "rigorous" thinking that is central to modern societies. It enables scientific explanation and theory-building, and their powerful application in technological innovation. These skills play an important part in making democratic as well as academic or intellectual life possible. Analytical thinking is a necessary skill for modern living, and most entering students need considerable help to gain the essential intellectual skills analytical thinking entails. </p> <p>Our quarrel, then, is not with analytical thinking itself but rather with the tendency in the academy to treat analytical thinking, along with mastery of substantive content, as <i>sufficient</i> goals for higher education. When this happens, the over-emphasis on analytical thinking creates an academic culture that reveres analytical rigor as the <i>only</i> important consideration, disconnecting rigorous thinking from sources of human meaning and value. This threatens to create a culture of argument that is so skeptical and detached that it can become unmoored from the human purposes that rationality and rigor are meant to serve. Analytical thinking teaches students how to argue all sides of an issue, but pursued by itself, it often leaves them with the sense that the ultimate choice of where to come down is arbitrary. One result is that humanities disciplines, in particular, come to be regarded by students as trading in mere "opinion" as opposed to rigorously demonstrated "facts"—which appear the only kind of knowledge worth having.</p> <p>This is not a new problem. At the source of Western rationality, Plato already was warning about the nihilistic potential of acquiring skills of critical argument that are not well grounded by a moral compass. Plato has Socrates humorously compare such unmoored, fledgling dialecticians to young hounds who discover they can tear to bits any argument, making the weaker and worse case seem like the stronger and better one. (Many academics, perhaps, can recognize in this description more than a few young and not-so-young hounds they have encountered.) </p> <p>Analytical thinking is an incomplete educational agenda in part because it disconnects rationality from purpose, and academic understanding from practical understanding or judgment. In order to prepare for decision and action in the world, students need to develop not only facility with concepts and critical analysis but also judgment about real situations in all their particularity, ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity. They need to develop practical reasoning.</p> <p>Despite the challenge this near-exclusive emphasis on analytical reasoning poses, we believe that higher education can be reshaped so that it better serves the cultivation of students' sense of purpose and responsibility, even as it continues to strengthen the rigor of their thinking. Once recognized, the thinness of the way critical thinking is currently presented to students can be corrected. In fact, resources for such correction and enrichment are already present in many parts of the university, although they may not be recognized as such. </p> <p>In the Carnegie Foundation's studies of undergraduate preparation in fields such as engineering, nursing and business, we have discovered that when professions confront the problem of shaping students to be competent and responsible future practitioners of their fields, they inevitably have to invent ways of teaching practical reasoning to guide and direct analytical capacities. Some even find ways to connect these teaching practices with concerns about meaning and purpose in the arts and sciences disciplines, thus bridging the notorious divide between "pure" and "applied" learning. </p> <p>Plato might be surprised by this finding, but we suspect he would also be pleased. Like Moliere's character who suddenly discovers that he has been speaking prose all his life, a more focused attention to how and where practical reasoning is being taught may bring today's academy to rediscover in some of its peripheries ways to bring essential but too often neglected purposes of higher education back to the center of attention.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Assessing How Students Learn</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:07:42 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Bill Cerbin </div> </div> </div> <p><em>Educator Bill Cerbin argues that if the goal of higher education is to improve students' future performance, then the common practice of assessing </em>what<em> students have learned is not enough. What is also required is "assessment that reveals </em>how<em> students learn." </em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>In higher education the dominant mode of assessment is to measure what students have learned in a course or program. By measuring <em>what</em> students learn educators can monitor student progress, determine learning gaps and gains, and document achievement.</p> <p>But measuring what students learn is of limited use if our goal is to improve their future performance. It is akin to taking a person's temperature. You may learn the individual has a fever but the measurement produces no insight into the cause. Suppose we find that students score in the 60th percentile on a standardized test or that half the students in a course have significant writing problems. What should we do to improve future performance? Unfortunately, the assessment data provide little direction. The result is a kind of guesswork by which we consider alternative teaching practices or programs without understanding how or why they would work better than standard approaches.</p> <p>To reduce the guesswork we need assessment that reveals <em>how</em> students learn—how they interpret and make sense of the subject, where they stumble, what they do when they do not understand the material, how they respond to different instructional practices, and so on. Understanding the basis of student performance can help us identify appropriate teaching practices or approaches.</p> <p>A compelling example of this form of assessment is the Berkeley calculus project which took place more than 25 years ago. At the time there was a large disparity between the performance of African American students and other students in introductory calculus at UC Berkeley. About 40 percent of African American students received grades of D or F in calculus compared to about 5-6 percent of Caucasian and Asian students. Concerned about the disparity, mathematics educator Uri Treisman decided to explore the problem by focusing on how students learn. He wanted to understand</p> <blockquote><p>. . . <em>how students actually learn calculus. Do they use the textbook? With whom and why do they discuss homework assignments? What do they do when they get stuck on a problem?—the really basic questions about how students learn mathematics</em>. (<a href="http://bfc.sfsu.edu/cgi-bin/prob.pl?Uri_Treismans_Dolciani_Lecture" target="_blank">Uri Treisman's Dolciani Lecture</a>)</p></blockquote> <p>Treisman observed 40 students (20 African American and 20 Chinese American) as they went about studying and learning calculus. He was able to identify key differences in the ways that successful and unsuccessful students tried to learn mathematics. For example, Chinese students formed study groups outside of class and devoted their time to the most difficult material rather than simply reviewing the mathematics they already knew. They compared solutions, tested one another, and talked through difficult concepts. The African American students also invested a lot of time studying calculus, but did it alone. Only two ever studied with classmates.</p> <p>Based on a detailed understanding of these patterns, Treisman established a program to alter the way students learned calculus in the course. It included, for example, "honors sections" of the course in which small groups of students worked on particularly challenging mathematics problems. The program addressed each obstacle that had been uncovered by observing the students. After the changes were fully implemented the percentage of D and F grades for African American students dropped to 4 percent, a stunning improvement. (See a contemporary version of the project at <a href="http://cns.utexas.edu/current_students/emerging_scholars_program/" target="_blank">Emerging Scholars Program</a>.)</p> <p>A large scale study like the Berkeley project is not a practical option for most teachers. However, assessing how students learn can be integrated with classroom teaching. Teachers can <em>scale down</em> to examine how students learn during a single exercise, assignment, or class period, or focus on how they learn a specific concept, skill, or ability. (See the Carnegie sponsored project, <a href="http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/specc">Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges</a>.)</p> <p>Consider several methods accessible to most classroom teachers.</p> <p><strong>Observations of Student Learning</strong>. As the venerable American philosopher Yogi Berra put it, "You can observe a lot just by watching." What better way to explore how students learn than to observe them engaged in learning during a class period? Teachers can do this during class discussions, group work, active learning exercises, online chat or discussion forums. Better yet, instructors can do periodic observations of student learning in one another's classes and then meet to discuss their findings.</p> <p><strong>Think Aloud</strong>. The think aloud is a procedure during which students say out loud what they are thinking while working on a task. <em>Think aloud pair problem solving</em> involves student pairs, in which one student acts as problem solver, the other as listener. The instructor circulates among the pairs to observe students thinking aloud as they work on an assigned task.</p> <p><strong>Lesson Study.</strong> In lesson study several instructors jointly plan, teach, observe and analyze student learning in the context of a single lesson. As one member of the group teaches the lesson, the others observe students and collect evidence of their learning. Lesson study allows instructors to observe the interaction between instructional activities and student learning during an entire class period. (See examples of lesson studies by instructors at University of Wisconsin campuses at <a href="http://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/lsp/" target="_blank">College Lesson Study Project</a>.)</p> <p>Strategies that probe the learning process offer close up views of students grappling with new material, engaging in complex thinking and responding to instruction in the classroom. For example, when asked to explain social behavior college students tend to rely on a single dominant factor such as a person's upbringing or a personality trait. Psychology instructors at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse used lesson study to explore ways to move students beyond these everyday theories of behavior. They designed a lesson in which students produced more varied and comprehensive explanations consistent with discipline-based models of behavior. But exposing students to the "correct theory" and engaging them in more complex theorizing did not change their minds. As one student said, "There may be all these other factors but I still believe the way you act depends on what kind of person you are." The episode prompted the instructor to develop sets of mini-cases in which students used psychological principles to explain behavior in "real life like" situations throughout the course.</p> <p>College teachers are aware of gaps in student learning as a result of routinely grading their students' work. Encouraging teachers to assess student learning as it takes place in the classroom can help them answer questions about how and why the gaps exist. Assessing how students learn can lead to the kind of information we need to make decisions about how to improve teaching and learning.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The Business of Business Education Is More than Business</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:12:24 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Tom Ehrlich </div> </div> </div> <p><em>With the need for critical analysis and good judgment in business more important than ever, the author argues that we must strengthen our commitment to ensure that undergraduate students who major in business and other professional fields also gain the benefits of a strong liberal-arts education.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>John Maynard Keynes tells this story about the people of Rossel Island, southeast of New Guinea, who used stones for money. “One of the largest and most valuable of these stones lay at the bottom of the sea, the boat which was importing it having capsized. But there being no doubt that the stone was there, these civilized islands saw no objection to including it as part of their stock of currency—its lawful owner at any time being, in fact, thereby established as the richest man in the island—or to changing its ownership ... .”</p> <p>Keynes’s point in telling the story was that as long as the islanders had confidence that the large stone was in the water, they had no problem including it in their money supply. But if they were to lose that confidence, they would refuse to recognize the stone as currency. Their monetary system, like ours, was built on faith.</p> <p>Today, our economic waters are roiling and none of us is sure that our dollars are worth much more than stones on Rossel Island. No less troubling, we have no faith that the economic precepts preached by economic theorists and practitioners are valid. We had been taught that economic markets, left on their own, have built-in self-correction mechanisms to ensure against catastrophic melt-down. Most of us probably wanted to believe that and we did not spend much time thinking about whether it was really true. But we have learned to our regret and financial loss that this dogma is false. To the contrary, many of us feel that the invisible hand has been stuck deep in our pockets and has stolen our wallets.</p> <p>No one can doubt that we need to be thinking through how we got into the economic mess in which we find ourselves and how we might best extricate ourselves. We have a new administration in Washington that is focused hard on just those issues. But it is also the responsibility of each of us to become wiser in these arenas.</p> <p>During the economic boom, many in the academy expressed concern about the extent to which greed had become a dominant motive in American life. But few of us objected to increases in our retirement accounts or pressed very hard to find out why the steady rise in the value of our homes not only seemed too good to be true, but was.</p> <p>In retrospect, the familiar academic strengths of skepticism and an insistence on viewing issues from multiple perspectives could have helped. Both of those qualities might have encouraged us to question the notion that the U.S. economy would keep on growing and with it the global economy. Both of those qualities are also at the heart of a strong liberal education. At its best, a liberal education fosters a deep sense of skepticism about accepted dogma. That sense means that one should not accept explanations for what is going on in the world without demanding the evidence to back up those explanations, weighing the evidence against possible competing claims, and then reaching considered judgments based on rational analysis rooted in the evidence. A liberal education should provide the intellectual tools for this process of deep inquiry. It should also provide multiple lenses through which to view the world and its problems. The ability to see issues from varying vantage points is critical to the exercise of good judgment in complex situations.</p> <p>The application of critical analysis and good judgment to economic issues is important for all students, but surely it is essential for students majoring in business. Business leaders need to understand the historical, cultural, scientific, organizational, and political contexts of their domain, and these are best gained through liberal education. This need raises for us a question: to what extent are undergraduates majoring in business on campuses across the country gaining these and the other attributes of a strong liberal education? My Carnegie Foundation colleagues and I are currently engaged in a project to study just that issue. We are undertaking this work because we think that unless the central goals of a liberal education are integrated with business education, students majoring in business will be deprived of a broad education that prepares them for leadership in their work, and they will not gain the intellectual, moral, and civic learning they need to be responsible individuals and members of their communities.</p> <p>We think that the liberal arts have much to offer those training for careers in business to understand better how we arrived at the current economic crisis and how we might work our way out. We also believe that the liberal arts can benefit from business education—this learning street should be two-way—and we have some ideas for ways to promote this benefit. But my focus in this brief commentary is on bringing liberal arts sensibilities into the business curriculum. So, for example, business programs could help students consider a range of alternatives to assumptions that previously have been taken for granted.These include assumptions about the operations of the economy that have recently been called into question. And this intellectual broadening needs to be paired with judgment grounded in a concern for the wellbeing of all, another hallmark of liberal learning.</p> <p>In his second inaugural, to a country reeling from a depression, Franklin Roosevelt said that, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” We should not need a second depression to relearn that lesson. I hope that faculty who teach in colleges and universities can help us think through what good economics looks like.</p> </article> <article> <h1>From Special Occasion to Regular Work</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:41:41 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Pat Hutchings </div> </div> </div> <p><em>In this month's Perspectives, Carnegie Vice President Pat Hutchings argues that “professional development” should not be a separate or special occasion but an integral feature of the way educators do their work everyday.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.</p> <p>Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being "developed" is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens <em>to</em> you; even worse, there's a sense that something's broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC sites have adopted the language of "faculty inquiry," pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students' learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.</p> <p>First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be <strong>sustained over time</strong>. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus's goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. "We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior," one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project "has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time." Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.</p> <p>A second principle is the importance of <strong>collaboration</strong>. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have—because institutions provide—so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, "Good things happen when teachers talk."</p> <p>Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.</p> <p>The third defining feature is a <strong>focus on evidence about student learning</strong>. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.</p> <p>Most important, certainly, is information at the classroom level, generated through the regular routines of teaching and learning: student performance on exams, projects, papers, problem sets, office consultations, and grades. This kind of information is at the heart of powerful feedback loops. But an important lesson of SPECC's work is the power of viewing classroom data through the lens of larger institutional trends and patterns. Most campuses have a good deal of such information: data about student demographics, enrollment, retention, and the like. What's needed are occasions to raise questions that fall into what might be described as the "missing middle"—the gap between information from individual classrooms and institutional data in the form of big-picture, aggregate trends and patterns. The power of focusing between and connecting these two is nicely illustrated by a story from Los Medanos College where the Developmental Education Committee realized that their efforts to reshape curriculum and pedagogy needed to be informed by evidence faculty members did not have, including—and especially—patterns of student course taking and <em>success beyond the level of individual courses</em>. The Committee approached the Office of Institutional Research, and the two groups worked together to develop a data-gathering plan that would address the questions faculty wanted to understand more fully. The result was a report tracking students from pre-collegiate courses in English and math into the first level of transfer English and math courses. This was not the kind of information Institutional Research staff members were in the habit of preparing; nor was it a perspective that faculty were accustomed to seeing. But it turned out to provide a powerful rationale for redoubling efforts that keep students moving through the developmental sequence without stopping out.</p> <p>Fortunately, the three principles proposed here are becoming increasingly commonplace; some readers will recognize them from Carnegie's work on the scholarship of teaching and learning. But it's worth remembering that this different way of thinking about professional development really <em>is</em> different—maybe even radical—predicated as it is on an understanding of teaching not as a matter of individual expertise employed in the privacy of one's own classroom but as a set of practices that have and need a social and organizational context. Seen through this lens, "professional development" should not be a separate or special occasion but an integral feature of the way educators do their work everyday. What matters in such work is who talks with whom, how often, with what information in the picture, and around what shared questions, processes, and goals. These turn out to be hard things to change, which is why having new models—like the ones developed on the SPECC campuses—is so important.</p> </article> <article> <h1>When Access is Not Enough</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:40:20 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Vincent Tinto </div> </div> </div> <p><em>The author writes that for too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door. In examining what can be done, he recognizes the centrality of the classroom to student success.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>While many observers applaud the fact that the access to higher education for low-income students has increased over the past two decades and the gap in access between them and higher income students decreased, few have pointed out that the gap in the completion of four-year degrees has not decreased. Indeed, it appears to have increased somewhat. That this is the case reflects a range of issues not the least of which is the well-documented lack of academic preparation which disproportionately impacts low-income students. The result is that while more low-income students are entering college, fewer are able to successfully complete their programs of study and obtain a four-year degree. For too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door.</p> <p>What is to be done? Clearly there is no simple answer to this important question. Yet it is apparent that unless colleges are able to more effectively address the academic needs of low-income students in ways that are consistent with their participation in higher education, little progress is possible. But doing so will be not achieved by practice as usual, by add-ons that do little to change the experience of low-income students and the ways academic support is provided. Too many colleges adopt what Parker Palmer calls the "add a course" strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of student success, in particular that of new students? Add a course, such as a Freshman Seminar, but do little to reshape the prevailing educational experiences of students during the first year. Need to address the needs of academically underprepared students? Add several basic skills courses, typically taught by part-time instructors, but do nothing to reshape how academic support is provided to students or how those courses are taught. Therefore, while it is true that there are more than a few programs for academically underprepared students, few institutions have done anything to change the prevailing character of their educational experience and therefore little to address the deeper roots of their continuing lack of success.</p> <p>Fortunately, there are currently some who have, and their efforts could point the way for other colleges to follow. These are efforts that take seriously the task of reforming existing practice. Among these is the use of supplemental instruction that connects academic support to the classrooms in which students are trying to learn. For example at <a href="http://www.elcamino.edu/studentservices/fye/si/index.asp">El Camino College in California</a>, where students—particularly low-income students—approach college one course at a time, supplemental instruction is aligned with a specific class and its goal is to help students succeed in that one course. In other instances academic support is embedded in a course as is the case in the iBest initiative at <a href="http://flightline.highline.edu/cg/ibest.html">Highline Community College in the State of Washington</a>.</p> <p>The adaptation of learning communities for underprepared students in which basic skills courses are linked to other courses in a coherent fashion is another effort that seems to pay off. At <a href="http://www.laguardia.edu/">LaGuardia Community College</a> in New York, what is being learned is that basic skills courses can be applied to the task of learning in the other course(s) to which those courses are linked. Students participating in LaGuardia’s learning communities support one another, while faculty also work with each other and the students, ensuring that assignments across courses are related. The result? Students are more likely to improve in both performance and persistence.</p> <p>Other efforts that focus on the teaching of basic skills courses are also bearing fruit. In California and in several other states, faculty are coming to together to explore how they can restructure the teaching of basic skills to better promote the success of their students. An initiative by the Carnegie Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), is one of these. At the SPECC institutions, collaborative faculty inquiry groups are exploring different approaches to classroom instruction, curriculum, and academic support. Their inquiry into the effects of these approaches engages a wide range of data, including examples of student work, classroom observations, and quantitative campus data.</p> <p>What these and other efforts have in common is the recognition of the centrality of the classroom to student success and the need to restructure our efforts and the support students receive in those places of learning which, for most low-income students, may be the only place on campus where they meet each other and the faculty and engage in learning. Lest we forget, most academically underprepared low-income students do not think of success as being framed by the first year experience, the second year experience and so on as do many academic researchers. Rather it is, in their view, constructed one course at a time. You succeed in one course, then move on to the second course, and so on. If our efforts to promote the success of low-income students, especially those who enter college academically underprepared, are to succeed, our efforts must be directed to those courses and the classrooms in which they take place, one course at a time.</p> <p>What these and other initiatives also demonstrate is that the success of academically underprepared students does not arise by chance. It does not arise from practice as usual, but is the result of intentional, structured, and proactive efforts on their behalf that change the way we go about the task of providing students the support they need to succeed in college. Without such support, the access to college we provide them does not provide meaningful opportunity for success.</p> </article> <article> <h1>When Coaching and Testing Collide</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:18:49 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Lee S. Shulman </div> </div> </div> <p><em>In an insightful commentary, the author ruminates on the dilemmas of coaching in the context of high-stakes testing.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>It's a scene we have watched dozens of times in the movies. A young man or woman of modest talent tries out for the baseball or football or basketball team under the tutelage of a gruff, demanding coach who expresses initial doubts about the likelihood that the kid will prove himself or herself worthy of a spot on the team. The coach is tough and persistent, setting high standards and then mercilessly driving all his charges to meet them. In the climactic scene at the season's end, the good guys or gals are losing by several baskets, or runs, or a touchdown—depending on the sport. "Send me in, coach," pleads our young hero/ine, which coach reluctantly does. The kid scores the winning points, and the team wins. The coach turns out to have a heart of gold, and the reasons for his seeming cruelty become apparent.</p> <p>What exactly is it that the coach provides the aspirant? Let me propose five processes associated with both the coach and mentor roles: 1) technique, learned through endless drill; 2) strategy, that allows the person who is coached to become capable of a conception of the work that will turn out to be pivotal in their eventual victory; 3) motivation, which produces a "Rocky-like" level of commitment that will help them exceed their own and others' expectations; 4) vision, where players come together in a new vision of the process and their capabilities for success; and 5) identity, whereby the protagonist not only wins, but is transformed, with an internalized new sense of self.</p> <p>In sports there is always a clear line between the coaching situation and the performance context. When the final jump shot is made from the three-point line by the basketball player, the coach can't jump onto the court and give the ball the extra momentum or spin it might need. I prefer to call such typical relationships between a coach/mentor and player/protégé examples of <em>unmediated mentoring</em>. No separate product comes in the middle between the coaching and the performing that renders the relative contributions of the coach and the coached inherently ambiguous because the entire performance is visible and is itself the basis for evaluating success or failure.</p> <p>There is, however, an entire genre of <em>mediated mentoring</em>. The performance is not directly observed and has yielded a product which is the focal point of competition and evaluation. Thus in the case of mediated performances, the respective roles of coach and performer are inherently invisible. Although the five processes are in place and just as transformative, there is inherently no way to discern how much of the work was done independently by the candidate, by peers or by advisors.</p> <p>Whenever mentoring is mediated by a product whose actual authoring processes are not directly observable, as is the case with literature, objects of architectural or mechanical design, scholarly publications, doctoral dissertations, and even paintings, assessment of individual competence is problematic. But are these problems of educational measurement or a new set of realities regarding the conditions of expert performance? Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg and others point out that the crux of the problem may not be measurement error but rather the inherently social and interactive character of the performances whose competence is assessed. Writing is and should be critiqued and edited, as should painting, the designs for buildings and the research performed in scientific laboratories. To avoid mentoring merely to ensure the legitimacy of individual test scores might even be judged a form of malpractice! So we are faced with an essential tension between the inherently social character of most forms of complex human performance and the psychometric imperative to estimate a "true score" for ability or any other personal trait using the individual as the unit of analysis. </p> <p>In an education setting, the distinction between the scores that a student earns on any test-like event—multiple choice test, essay exam, portfolio or senior sermon in a seminary—and their underlying "true" capability is a reflection of the distinction, borrowed perhaps from the field of linguistics, between competence and performance. Psychometrics rests on the claim that the observed performance is a valid indicator if it tracks the underlying competence faithfully. But what if mentored or coached performances actually track underlying competence more validly than measurement of students working alone? What if the composition written by a student in the presence of his editing team is a better indicator of his future writing competence than having him write alone?</p> <p>That is what sits at the heart of the puzzle.</p> <p>My proposal for "getting over" this essential tension is three-fold: making changes in the processes of assessment, making explicit the parameters of mentoring, and developing a clear code of ethical principles for both assessment and mentoring. At the heart of these proposals is the principle of transparency. Everything possible must be done to ensure that the roles of mentors, peers and students be transparently clear in any mediated mentoring activity. There should be ways of reporting on the character of coaching for test performance that make the efforts of the coach entirely transparent to assessment.</p> <p>I have often written that collaboration is a <em>marriage of insufficiencies</em>; that students can work together in ways that scaffold and support each others' learning, and in ways that support each others' knowledge. Now I call for a <em>marriage of sufficiencies</em> to overcome the essential tensions between individual work and collaborative performance, coaching support and independent assessment, the mentor as an agent of zealous advocacy and the mentor as a steward of the commons.</p> <p>As Dewey observed, we will not solve this problem, we will get over it. It is built in to the psychometric paradox: Our measurement models are <em>psycho</em>metric but our assessment needs are often <em>socio</em>metric, requiring the measurement of socially scaffolded and joint productions.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Creating Windows on Learning</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:23:50 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Molly Breen </div> </div> </div> <p><em>The author reports on recent promising efforts by community college faculty to make the teaching and learning from their classrooms more visible.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>Every year hundreds of thousands of students begin their higher education in community colleges. Of course, these institutions also bring in large numbers of new faculty. For both groups, students and faculty alike, there are plenty of challenges to go around.</p> <p>Imagine yourself in the shoes of a newly hired instructor at a community college. If you're lucky, you've landed a full-time position, but more likely you're working as an adjunct, teaching on one campus in the morning and another in the afternoon. You put in years writing an English thesis on, say, spiritual autobiography in the 18th century, or a math thesis on primal decomposition in modules and lattice modules, only to find yourself teaching basic literacy or numeracy skills in a class three levels below the first course in the transfer sequence. You don't object to teaching students basic skills; in fact, you find it fascinating. You've just never had so much as a day of training on the subject. So what do you do?</p> <p>Faculty members at California community colleges have been asking that question in large numbers lately, spurred on by numerous reports—from the Academic Senate, from the Hewlett Foundation, from the Chancellor's office—that all point to the urgency around basic skills education. They have asked it of themselves, certainly, in private moments of bafflement or frustration, but as part of the Carnegie project Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), they've also asked it of each other, transforming the question from "What do I do?" to "What do <em>we</em> do?"</p> <p>Their work together has led to a number of improvements in teaching basic skills, including the innovative pairing of classes through learning communities and experiments with high-intensity teaching formats, particularly in math. But their initial questions have also led to further, sharper questions: Why do so many of my students earning a C or higher wind up dropping the class? What makes word problems so difficult for so many math students? How much of the homework that I assign do my students actually read? What is going on in my student's head when he tackles a new equation? Is what I'm doing even working?</p> <p>The faculty at work on the 11 SPECC campuses have tackled these questions through a variety of methods: observing each others' classes; creating common finals and assessment methods; devising pre- and post- tests as a way of pinning down desired student learning outcomes; videotaping student "think-alouds" in mathematics; adapting metacognitive or "intentional" reading strategies to math and ESL classrooms, and many more.</p> <p>Beyond sharing the results of these pedagogical experiments with each other, some faculty have taken the extra step of documenting their work on the web. These websites are rich with data. In one, the instructor posts the results of her department's common algebra final and reflects on her students' performance. Another site includes a video of four beginning ESL students, with four native languages between them, working together to unpack a poem in English. Indeed, as well as affording teachers the chance to cringe at their wardrobe choices on the day of filming, video allows instructors to capture student learning in all its compelling complexity, from a single student explaining where he gets stuck on a word problem to an entire class speculating on why an anonymous student from a previous semester had dropped out and what lessons they can take from that experience to increase their own chances of success.</p> <p>These multimedia sites have been collected in the SPECC <a href="http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=2814408673732&id=94404660812025">Windows on Learning Gallery</a>. The sites can be used in a variety of ways: as archives of teaching and research materials; as hands-on resources for teachers who can download materials and study their implementation in an actual classroom; and as tools for professional development. A number of faculty presented their sites at the annual Strengthening Student Success conference held in San Jose, California in October, among other venues, and have used their sites to forge connections with community college instructors across the country doing similar research and exploring similar formats for making their work visible. An especially nice feature of these sites is that they preserve the trace of both teaching <em>and</em> inquiry, so that the complicated process of properly identifying a problem of learning; designing an intervention to address it; and evaluating the success of the intervention becomes clear.</p> <p>Through this kind of documentation and exchange questions about teaching that once might have lead merely to migraines—or to a growing sense of isolation and disillusionment—lead to discussion, research, experimentation, data collection and further inquiry. All of these are processes that can be recorded and shared, and it is this act of recording, of making teaching visible, that creates a crucial difference between the sort of teaching that Carnegie President Lee Shulman has described as "evaporating at room temperature" and a more durable alternative. The more visible teaching becomes, and the more durable its best practices, the better for students.</p> <p>And the better, certainly, for that new hire tackling the risks and rewards of teaching basic skills for the first time.</p> </article> <article> <h1>It's All About Time!</h1> <p>Nick Warren — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:59:37 +0000</p> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-author"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> Lee S. Shulman </div> </div> </div> <p><em>In pondering the many challenges of basic skills education, Shulman finds inspiration in the advice of one of his mentors, Benjamin Bloom.</em></p> <hr /> <p> </p> <p>Imagine a patient wheeled into an emergency room after a massive coronary. The attending physician examines him and declares that the heart attack, while serious, is appropriate for treatment. "Our policy is to allocate four days for the treatment of such conditions," she states. "What if that isn't enough time for the required treatment to have an effect?" "We'll just have to give your infarct a C- and move you out."</p> <p>Is that as crazy as it sounds? Of course it is. But it's also the way we design and manage much of our educational system—It's all about time!</p> <p>As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, I worked closely with Benjamin Bloom, who is best known for the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. We were re-analyzing longitudinal data sets that tracked the physical, intellectual and educational development of youngsters from early childhood to young adulthood. We were eager to understand what kinds of interventions, at what points in a child's life, would be most effective in improving growth and development, both physically and cognitively. Bloom's work was one of the major influences on the development of the federal Head Start program (and on me, a grateful and impressionable graduate student). He remained interested in the timing and quality of educational interventions until the end of his career.</p> <p>After earning my doctorate and becoming a faculty member myself, I scheduled visits with Bloom at least once a year just to touch base. I recall a visit sometime around 1968; I was eager to tell him about my own work at the time, a study of how physicians make difficult diagnoses. And what I remember very clearly is that I got about three minutes into my story when Bloom jumped to his feet (was it something I said?), and exclaimed, "Lee! There's something else we must talk about." He had been reading the work of the psychologist of language John Carroll and his model of school learning. He agreed with Carroll's conclusion that the greatest barrier to student learning is the insane way in which we use time. Bloom proclaimed, "It's all about time!"</p> <p>The reason students fail, Bloom proceeded to explain, is not that they're not smart. It's that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them. What had become increasingly clear to him is that nearly anybody can learn nearly anything given enough time. He noted that what we've done instead, is create a system of schooling that guarantees that only a tiny fraction of our students ever achieve the highest levels of success. Our fundamental error, according to Bloom (and John Carroll before him), is that we treat time as a constant and permit achievement to vary. Bloom argued that we must begin to treat achievement as a constant while we design time to be variable.</p> <p>This idea struck Bloom like a lightning bolt. He proposed a veritable Copernican revolution in our conception of the relationship between time and learning. Time must be permitted to vary in the interests of maximizing learning. Education cannot be treated like a football game with only 60 minutes of playing time.</p> <p>The Carnegie Foundation is currently involved in a project with California community colleges committed to improving the success of students who are underprepared to succeed in college-level courses. We're working with faculty to identify the most powerful interventions. The failure rate in these "developmental" courses is stunningly high. Far too many students enter the revolving door of developmental education and never succeed in moving on to credit-bearing courses. The project is both inspiring and daunting, and it's got me thinking about Bloom's point as a different way to think about student success. Rather than treating time as fixed and success as variable—the usual formula in our educational system—I believe we need to initiate a reform that begins by reversing the two. Otherwise, we are destined to guarantee that student success rates look just like a normal curve or worse, like a skewed distribution in which only a small number actually achieve sufficiently to succeed.</p> <p>Bloom's point, and mine, is that the normal curve ought to be emblazoned on the hearts of every teacher as a symbol of failure rather than as a representation of natural law. Learning should never result in a normal curve. It should result in a kind of "J curve" in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.</p> <p>Bloom's answer to this realization was to spend the next 15 years developing an approach called "mastery learning." Learning for mastery was Bloom's attempt to take these ideas and work with educators all across the country to design programs of instruction where success was fixed, where time was variable, where the quality of instruction was modified, adapted and redesigned to insure that students experienced enough success to persist in their efforts.</p> <p>I'm not suggesting we revive the somewhat dormant methods of mastery learning. (Its rise and fall is another story altogether.) The notion that a single predetermined level of mastery for all students in all courses is problematic. We can't increase time without limits for all students and all subjects. And time alone cannot succeed without also improving the quality of instruction and student persistence. But I am suggesting that the most powerful approaches to learning, especially to the learning of students who have not been well served by the educational system and who therefore find themselves in "developmental" courses, means being willing to think differently about the relationship between time and achievement. And once you break the shackles of time, you will find yourself imagining ways to improve teaching, learning, student motivation and course design that can make a real difference. I'll talk a bit about those differences in next month's<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>Perspectives.</p> </article> </main></body></html>