Why kids in the middle grades need a skill-centered curriculum

Our schools simply do not do enough to engender a gratifying sense of independence that empowers young people, and tipping the scales towards a more skill-centered curriculum can change that. A curriculum centered around skill-development stands to make young people attach to their academic setting much more vigorously. If on a daily basis, kids are mastering skills and applying them to produce results, they will find the academic aspect of school as engaging or fulfilling as the social, artistic, and athletic aspects typically are. 

Kids love to master skills, because skills allow them to do things own their own. Now, if you work with kids ages 11-15, you know well that little makes them feel better than independence, and skill mastery is a great source of independence. When kids can do things on their own, they feel good about themselves, they feel empowered. A happy and empowered kid is one who will learn effectively and feel attached to his or her environment.

The shortcoming of a content-centered curriculum, as most middle school core academic classes are, is that it bores kids and alienates them from the potential value of subjects they are studying. Kids in this age group are not very interested in information that is not applicable: they want to know things so that they can do things with the information. A skill-centered curriculum uses the content as a medium for teaching the skills. As a result, kids interaction with the information is positive: it always leads to skill utilization and independent production.

So if we limit our content delivery to what facilitates skill development, and then spend our teaching time helpings kid master and apply skills, we will have kids who love being at school.

littleBits Delivers an Important Skill

Last week at Launch Education and Kids, I saw a really high quality presentation about littleBits. This is a company that has already been well funded and is marketing itself fairly broadly. The founder, Ayah Bdeir, had her company be a sponsor of Launch Education and Kids, and she presented at the opening as an example of an educational technology product that has both a clear educational mission and is experiencing some real success.

littleBits is brilliant. If you have not yet seen this circuit building Lego style activity set- they call it an "open source library of electronic modules that snap together with magnets for prototyping, learning and fun"- you need to check it out. It's attractive, easy to use, and really fun to play around with. The company seeks to help young people understand how circuitry works in the electonics around us. They have a strong commitment to empowering young people with concrete, interactive experiences that will help demystify what is both omnipresent and taken for granted. As kids build the snap together circuits, with pieces that are color coded for function, they can create light, sound, and motion outputs. The tactile element is obviously a great appeal, but the skill delivered here is not necessarily related to that- unless you have a class full of budding electricians.

The value of littleBits for the middle level learner is one of empowerment through demystification. We know how much this age group needs to feel control of their surroundings and how much they crave autonomy; the psychological effect of grasping how everyday objects work is really positive for them.  When circuitry, thus technology, can be explained as something physical, when it can be visualized and controlled on the most basic level, the world of the middle-level learner becomes less controlled by outside forces, less scary. It becomes less the source of disenfranchisement, less the object of self-protecting detachment. Seeing their world this way is a skill they need to master- and it certainly is a skill that middle level learners love to practice.

So my conclusion is that, if you are looking for educational technology that will engage your students on the level of meaningful skill development, littleBits is a winner  And as the company moves forward with their plans for leveled and programmable units, the product will grow even more valuable.

Linkbots are good for kids!

Today at Launch Education and Kids, I saw a presentation about a new modular robot product called Linkbots. They stretch the definition of robot, as each module looks more like a truncated soda can with flanges and a flat spot. Each module is  programmable and connectable and has a built-in rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery. The product is not being developed for the direct consumer, rather for educational settings, so its non-traditional appearance should not have an effect on its appeal. It uses C++ for programming  (with Java script version coming soon) and is highly adaptable.

Linkbots passes the skills test because programming is integrated and trial and error is a big part of the construction process. Middle level learners will love this because of the ability to customize form and function. It's already being delivered to some school settings, and with an imminent second round of funding (their presentation to panel of potential investors was really well received), they should be able to get the price point down to something more accessible to schools.

Barobo gets kids and technology together in an intellectual, experimental, and tactile way. Linkbots is a hearty product that will survive hands-on time with kids and deliver meaningful skill development.

Heading for Launch

I have been thinking a lot lately about the role of technology in the classroom.  I am particularly interested in exploring how the educational technology industry is approaching skill development. Technology is great for accessing information and creating documentation of content mastery, not to mention the proiliferation of "personal learning management" applications, but I want to see if anyone is tuned in to the possible market for technology products that engender skill development.

To that end, I am heading out to Launch Education, a two day conference in Mountain View, to see what is new in the industry. A number of educational technology pioneers and entreprenuers will be presenting their latest products and websites. I look forward to talking to a number of established companies and start-ups to see what they have to offer students. I plan to review some of the products and assess the general state of the educational technology industry in these pages in the coming weeks.

I am afraid that skill development is getting marginalized by the twin specters of highstakes testing and sexy technologies. While Common Core is an improvement over NCLB, it still requires excess attention to content digestion at the expense of process practicing. And the amount of resources- both monetary and temporal- that can readily be devoted to technology management with middle level learners further cuts in to teacher directed skill development. I am no Luddite, but I want to see the power of technology harnessed for deep learning , and I believe this a time-consuming and labor intensive process. Many schools are prioritizing technology acquistion over teacher training becuase of a societal preference for form over function. Or at least such a preference by those schools' most influential stakeholders...

It is an exciting time in education; I see a lot of signs that we are moving into a new period of reconceptualization of the currency of the classroom. Its not a revolution, but an evolution towards more compassionate, student-centered instruction.

Prezi and Skill Development

If you want your students to be excited about planning and creating well-organized and effective summative assessments, all the while developing deep thinking and communication skills, teach them Prezi. This “power point on steroids” presentation platform does more for student skill development than anything I have ever seen. Everything a student produces with Prezi has the potential to be poetry, essay, and painting; the process of building a Prezi exercises all the organizing, writing, and symbol creation abilities we want our young thinkers to develop. When they construct their presentations in Prezi, you get to watch them show their knowledge, their creativity, their independence, and their command of metaphor with enthusiasm.

Prezi should be in every classroom because of the skill development it affords students. The organizational components are similar to those in essay or Powerpoint planning; every lesson a teacher has ever given in outlining is applicable to Prezi construction. So as students are planning the progression of content delivery in a Prezi, they are developing their argument construction skills.

But Prezi’s innovative value is at the next layer of organization: at the visual representational level. The use of color, proportion, spatial relationships, and narrowing and expanding frame of reference (Zooming!) all cultivate abstract thinking skills and reinforce the idea of the visual power of message delivery.  A teacher who wants to develop expository writing skills in students can work on the fundamentals of creative writing (metaphor) and rhetoric (persuasion) at the same time. As I have played with it, the metaphorical possibilities in message creation with Prezi reminds me of free verse poetry or abstract painting.

Helping students cultivate their ability to understand the effectiveness of message delivery on multiple levels fosters communication and expression skills we want in our kids. The kicker, however, is that these are skills that students love to exercise when they have technological and visual components. Because choice and detail are such important elements of student ownership of project, offering that in the midst of an exercise in organization is brilliant. PPT brought us a ways from the essay, but Prezi “Zooms” kids to a whole new level of engagement in their own skill development.

Superimposing the Ego: The Primacy of Thoughtful Non-Academic Programming for Middle Level Learners

Thoughtful, proactive construction of middle school culture is extremely important, and non-academic programming is integral to that culture building. Given the developmental state of children in the middle years, their obsession with their immediate culture cannot be neglected by any institution that aspires to impart academic learning to them.

Culture resolves itself in a middle school, one way or the other. Legions of distinctively self-absorbed 11-14 year-olds cumulatively result in a palpable culture as their impulsivity and brazen gratification of ascending ids has primacy.  Anyone who has spent time in a middle school- especially this time of year- knows well the power of this. While student-centered academics must be in place to help channel these energies in the classroom, good affective programming and realistic adult-student interaction systems (discipline) are the key to making students feel both empowered and secure throughout the school day. Those of us who have stuck around middle schools do so for that inspiring blend of bravery and vulnerability, sincerity and clumsy affectation that the halls and classrooms exude. The best of us know we cannot fully control its sum, rather we actively seek ways to manage it to positive results. We admit the students will create the culture, but we know we can direct it.

The default culture of this age group- when more than a few members of it are together- is not positive; there is entirely too much insecurity and jockeying for position to preclude the accumulation of cruelties that serves to undermine its members’ collaborative and benevolent impulses. Programming that exercises the competitive and independent impulses must be thoughtfully facilitated to ensure the validation of the (often recessive) more benign instincts that we know we want our children to actualize in adulthood. In most settings, organized physical activity has been the ready answer to the question of what to do with adolescent energy, but the facilitators of athletic activities rarely have the degree of pedagogical understanding and discipline to deliver deep learning of the affective skills young people need. Athletics is an effective outlet for energy, but it just one of the building blocks- not the foundation- for some positive and inclusive culture. 

The skills we want our students to develop so that they can grapple with their conflicting impulses must be extant in our non-academic programming. If we want students to be collaborative, we must provide them with meaningful projects that only groups can accomplish. If we want them to be creative, we must present them with challenges that they can solve on their own. If we want them to be good communicators, we must facilitate opportunities for them to speak their minds. If we want them to be critical thinkers, we must present them with problems they care about to parse. If we want students to be inclusive, we must create experiences that highlight the value of individuality and difference. And if we want students to develop character, we must model it in our interactions with them and regularly point out examples of it in their actions.

So we must commit time and energy to multiple types of non-academic programming so that our students are most capable of feeling good about themselves and sharing their benign instincts more regularly. The culture they experience in this time will be their guide to the adult world and the palate of the skills needed in it.

The Role of the Administrator in the Teacher Centered School

As we continue our discussion of the “Teacher-Centered School,” we want to clarify a few of its tenets. Any school that values the student-centered classroom and attempts to deliver constructivist learning, deep skill-development, and the products that result from meaningful work, need acknowledge the amount of teacher preparation time required to do this well. It involves a substantially greater amount- and different type- of work than preparing the traditional classroom requires. Such a school should consider explicitly embracing the practices that would truly make it teacher centered. These include: talking about teachers as facilitators of skill-development, not as transmitters of content knowledge; acknowledging just how preparation-heavy the truly student-centered curriculum is; employing people who are committed to actualizing the power of collaboration and community-building and nurturing their abilities to do so; structuring abundant time into the school-year and school-day for program development and culture-building; limiting administrator pay to no more than 150% of average teacher salary; and believing that bright, empowered teachers working in a collaborative setting are the most qualified people to direct the evolution of curriculum that will deliver the skills our young people will need to be fulfilled and constructive members of the communities they will inherit.

If our schools are truly going to be devoted to skill development, we have to rethink the roles the teacher and administrators play. The delivery of the 21^st century skills of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and technological sophistication is the most meaningful thing that our middle and high school settings can do for our young people, but the institutional culture in education is not currently designed to facilitate this. If we are going to have the kind of student-centered classrooms that can deliver meaningful experiences around skill mastery, our teachers must be prepared and supported in a way they have not yet been. This requires a new vision of the administrators’ roles in our schools. They will be the key to developing the teachers who will thrive in the teacher-centered school.

The primary leader of the school could be considered the “Vision Communicator on Chief.” This person speaks passionately and clearly about the values of the institution to the stakeholders who are not employees. His  ability to convey the primacy of skill development and skill mastery to those audiences will legitimize the novel structure of the school. Clarifying then just how this skill development is facilitated at the school leads to an explanation of exactly how teachers prepare to teach in this model. He must then also be excellent at communicating the value-added to the community. Conceptually, none of this is a radical departure from the standard role to the Head of School in independent schools, but in substance and magnitude of importance it is. It is imperative that the stakeholders of the teacher-centered school fully comprehend, accept, and support this process, as it necessitates a different- read, more involved, more highly administrated, more expensive- commitment than most of them are familiar with.  This leader fully understands- and adores- the philosophy and pedagogy behind the teacher-centered school and devotes his time to ensuring that all stakeholders have the opportunity to do likewise.

This leader works closely with what could be considered the “Substance Securer in Chief,” whose job it is to nurture teachers to develop and deliver a curriculum that will get the students mastering the skills. The analogue in independent schools is the Academic Dean or the Assistant Head for Academics, in the public realm it’s the Curriculum and Instruction coordinator. In the teacher-centered school, this administrator is a master coordinator and support person who fully understands how the curriculum can get delivered, thus what the faculty members need before they step inside the classroom.  Most of her time is spent facilitating the teacher growth, program-development, and culture-building that will deliver the product that the other administrator is presenting to the stakeholders.

This administrator must be very strategic and always be looking at issues from the perspective of backwards design, because she will have to design student and faculty scheduling with the grand end-goals in mind. To execute the job most effectively, this administrator should have three great strengths: she understands skill acquisition in adolescents, what teachers need to feel professional and supported, and believes that her faculty members have the ability to help each other maximize the potential of their subjects.  This person creates transparent structures that reveal the path from ideal to product and works to tweak these paths for the personalities she is serving. She is a master orchestrator of the preparation and work flow of the teachers, and revels in the behind the scenes elan needed to produce the coherent product that the stakeholders value.

Our schools succeed when we programmatically honor the abilities and inclinations of all their members- students, faculty, and administrators alike. When we figure out how to best to do that, we will have thriving institutions that send our young people into the world validated, compassionate, and skilled. Administrators in teacher-centered schools are poised to deliver on this.