tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60114832024-03-14T02:15:15.698-04:00The New ProgressiveTo give expression to thoughts and concerns relating to the state of "progressive" independent education; to develop a continually evolving working definition of "progressive" education that has real meaning; and to pick up on the idea that new practices and new ideas have created a truly New Progressivism in education.Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-72732958452416485102011-01-06T18:02:00.003-05:002011-09-07T21:14:59.336-04:00Farewell, My FriendsThis will be the final post here; I am working toward moving my evolving spiel to a new venue, "<a href="http://www.notyourfathersschool.org/">Not Your Father's School</a>." My hope is to unify some of my thinking, which has been split between this blog and "<a href="http://www.admirablefaculties.org/">Admirable Faculties</a>."<br /><br />Part of my desire is to lose the specific focus on teaching and professional culture here and what I am feeling are my overly restrictive ties to what I have been calling the New Progressivism over there. There is something new going on in independent schools, and it has progressive roots, and it's very much tied to the way we organize and manage schools and their curricula, but I'd like a fresh start. (And where it is not going on, I believe pretty deeply that it should be, unless there is something equally serious and forward-thinking and thorough being offered as an alternative.)<br /><br />I'm still very pleased by the idea of the New Progressivism, but I've had occasion over the last year and a half to see the many ways in which the P word preconditions and distorts many people's understanding of the kind of education--the schools, their culture, the teaching--that the New Progressivism represents. It is not groovy and go-with-the-flow, it is not education conducted toward the establishment of moral relativism, and it is not "free" or "alternative." Being student-centered these days requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of social, physical, and cognitive development, not just a desire to be kids' best friend or to let them follow their bliss. Creating New Progressive curriculum requires a wealth of detailed and specific knowledge of the criteria by which effective and engaging learning experiences are designed and of the ways that student learning can be assessed. It requires standards and a deeply held set of core values and core aims. It is intentional, and it is very, very hard work; it can even require students to engage in very, very hard--but worthy--work.<br /><br />So I'm shedding the P word and taking a deep breath. I'm hoping to find the concepts and words to combine the threads of my thinking about education in the direction of helping independent school folks of all stripes consider what the next generation of schools--those schools that are not our father's schools--ought to look like and how they ought to go about the business of educating.<br /><br />73, friendsPeter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-35029480982980265702010-05-05T12:35:00.002-04:002012-06-25T12:39:23.630-04:00MIT presents "Blended Learning Revisited"--BEST THING EVERThis too long to summarize and too excellent not to offer in full. Professors John Seely Brown, Dava Newman, and John Belcher (all currently working at MIT) on the development of teaching methods that foster creativity, innovative thinking, productive collaboration, rigorous self- and peer-assessment, intellectual curiosity and risk-taking, and playfulness--everything that we talk about as being essential to "21st-century learning."
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It's 97 minutes, but you can watch it in segments--don't miss the Q&A at the end:
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UPDATE, June 2012: The video is no longer available for embed--but <a href="http://video.mit.edu/watch/blended-learning-revisited-9557/" target="_blank">here's the link</a>.<br />
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No continuation of this post--what you see here is what you get.Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-79720536280324034832010-02-19T13:29:00.004-05:002010-02-19T18:55:45.226-05:00Warmth by wire?Our professional day last week was built around a great conference sponsored by <a href="http://www.edsocialmedia.com/">EdSocialMedia</a>, with lots of good stuff for school communications/marketing folks as well as for classroom teachers. So many things to think about...<br /><br />I was fortunate to be part of a panel on "The Future of Teaching," led by <a href="http://antonioviva.com/">Antonio Viva</a> and featuring my colleague <a href="http://k12online.ning.com/profile/KelleyConnolly">Kelley Connolly</a> as well as <a href="http://sig1to1.ning.com/profile/WilliamStites">Bill Stites</a> of <a href="http://www.montclairkimberley.org/page.cfm?p=492">Montclair Kimberly Academy</a>, <a href="http://www.davidbill.org/">Dave Bill</a> of the Dwight School, and <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/11925971999830233807">Hans Mundahl</a> of New Hampton School. After it was over I kept having people tell me that I made sense, which worried me.<br /><br />What seemed to make sense to some folks--most of them, like myself, educators of a certain age--was my insistence that teachers of the future will still need to be compassionate and empathetic people who believe in kids and want to see them succeed--nothing that I haven't said in my books or anywhere else.<br /><br />Clearly these teachers, who aren't all slouches in the adoption of technology and a host of other "21st-century teaching techniques, are worried that in a more technology-driven, and specifically Web 2.0-infused educational world, the human connection that is so powerful in teaching might be lost.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />It's ironic that some people in independent schools, where strong, warm teacher-student relationships are not just the coin of the realm but arguably the <span style="font-style:italic;">raison d'etre</span>, are so enthusiastic about creating virtual and online environments in which to do their work. What occurred to me the other day is that maybe what we need to be thinking about, if we are truly going to blend face-to-face with online learning, is how to recreate the kind of warmth and connection virtually that we so naturally feel when we are sharing physical space with other human beings.<br /><br />So far, all the educational social media in the world, all the digital communications media, and all the virtual worlds in the universe haven't quite been able to recreate the feeling of being with real people, watching faces and body language and hearing nuances of expression that we can't generate digitally.<br /><br />What we need is "warmth by wire"--all the qualities of humanity delivered electronically.<br /><br />This could be a tall order. How do we create for ourselves and our students the kinds of environments in which our meatspace selves go through our lives? Human interaction, whether in classrooms or livingrooms or bedrooms, is a sensory festival, and the deeper souls among us tell us that most of us miss quite a lot of what is going on even when we're all in the same room.<br /><br />I'm willing to give technology a chance here, but I think it's going to be a while before they get it fully right. Virtual reality and augmented reality don't exactly look as though they are going to lose their clunkiness anytime soon, and the fact that in 2010 we still have to put on silly glasses to watch a movie in 3-D means that we're a ways from creating true immersive virtuality. Multisensory experiences are even clunkier; the writers of <span style="font-style:italic;">Star Trek</span> were probably onto something when the made <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck">holodecks</a> a feature of the distant future.<br /><br />Until we have holodecks (and probably long afterward), I guess, some of us are probably going to want to hold onto the idea of the classroom, some kind of physical space in which the warmth, energy, and weirdness of kids is infused with the complementary warmth, energy, and weirdness of human teachers. This doesn't mean that all education has to be F2F or that technology should not be added to the mixture in large gobbets. It doesn't mean that we ought to be halting the retreat of the human teacher from center stage to "guide of the side."<br /><br />This seems pretty much like common sense to me, but then I guess I'm of a certain age, myself. I think we still believe that little human beings are best brought up by human beings, Singularity or no, and school/education/learning is still fundamentally about bringing children up--helping them develop their character and interests in a social and interactive milieu--and not just teaching them skills and content. <br /><br />What I don't like is that so many people see technology and social media in the future of teaching as an either/or issue: You're either for the absolute precedence of technology in the classroom or you're an unreconstructed and probably dangerous Luddite, wallowing in outmoded Romantic ideas of what students must be offered. This false dichotomy is as shortsighted as it is arrogant.<br /><br />We need to see the need for balance--for warmth by wire and warmth in person--and we need to work at achieving it if we are to realize both the human potential of our students and the technical potential of the media in which we work.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-65409592697515815582010-02-12T17:24:00.002-05:002010-02-12T17:27:09.581-05:00When did it become all about leadership?Every time I turn around these days I find myself faced with either a new opportunity that will develop students' leadership capacities or someone looking for such an opportunity. <br /><br />I know that kids applying to college or filling out scholarship applications love being able to list the leadership positions they have had, and by the way the questions on some of these documents are phrased, it is clear that the universities of the world cannot have enough new students with gobs of demonstrated leadership ability.<br /><br />No wonder teams have tri- and quad-captains and every club or student organization has at least two co-presidents. Collaborative classwork is touted for the chances it gives students to develop and practice leadership skills, and for families with a few extra bucks, those fancy leadership programs (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/leadership-t.html">critiqued in the <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Times</a></span> a year or so back) are just the ticket for turning an average kid into a--leader! Half of the nation's charter schools seem to be "leadership academies," and half the nation's independent schools seem to be proud of the various leadership-development activities that they offer.<br /><br />Hey, leadership is great, and no one in our society could argue that we're seeing too much of it these days. But I have to wonder: Is all this emphasis on developing leadership skills--which seems often enough to mean simply developing the skills to look carefully and thoughtfully around, help out, and occasionally advocate around an issue or a community--really getting us anywhere, or are we simply devaluing a term that has a fairly august and specific and sometimes appalling historical meaning?<br /><br />From the birth of the republic through the age of John Dewey and up until not so many years ago, educators were focused on the idea, and the meaning, of educating young people to be participants in a democracy. The skills for doing this involved being alert and informed (looking carefully and thoughtfully around), stepping up to serve and participate where needed (helping out), and actively supporting one's beliefs, sometimes through voting and sometimes through advocacy.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />I'm not sure how many of the students being offered leadership training in classrooms, summer programs, and extracurricular activities, could tell you exactly what leadership means, or what its varieties might be. Was Hitler a leader, or Pol Pot? Is Barack Obama, or Sarah Palin? Is Oprah, or Lance Armstrong? We hear that the "teabaggers" don't have or necessarily want to have leaders--but someone has to organize the convention or be the talk radio spokesperson; are those people leaders, or commentators, or managers? There's also the question of whether the opposite of leader must be follower--and who is which.<br /><br />Certainly the best leadership programs explore these issues in real depth, as schools should have been doing all along if they are to prepare a knowledgeable and informed citizenry. I guess I am just a little puzzled, and kind of amused, that every child today must be a leader of tomorrow. I think we're overselling an idea that serves the ego (and polishes the resume: "I am your president/captain/leader!") at the expense of a broader, more historically relevant and socially and politically crucial concept, the simple and venerable idea that participants in a society need to think for themselves and act when they must based on principle and reason.<br /><br />I think that teaching students how to lead is quite important and quite progressive (old and New), but I think that it is even more important that we refocus some of the attention we give to attaining positions and titles of leadership on the more fundamental question of what it means to be an informed and effective member of a community. <br /><br />Leadership is neither about holding a title nor about having taken a multi-thousand dollar trip to Washington, D.C., and receiving a certificate. Leadership is about knowing when and how to step up and when and how to support--and sometimes oppose--others in the service of making the world a better place. <br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-56606509226462569432010-02-07T14:52:00.006-05:002010-02-07T16:27:57.911-05:00Books, must read: CURRICULUM 21, edited by Heidi Hayes JacobsMost of us are buried under piles of must-read books on educational topics, but I'm afraid I generally prefer books whose prefaces and cover blurbs don't tell the whole story--a common failing of education books. Thus, when <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109008.aspx">Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World</a></span> (ASCD, 2010) arrived as a premium with my <a href="http://www.ascd.org/">ASCD</a> membership, I read the back and started the Introduction without expecting much.<br /><br />Don't get me wrong. I've been a fan of <a href="http://www.curriculumdesigners.com/">Heidi Hayes Jacobs</a>, who edited the book and wrote the key early chapters, ever since spending the better part of a week in a workshop with her and Grant Wiggins in 1994; I'm a long-time believe in curriculum mapping, and every time I've heard Dr. Jacobs since then I've come away with lots of good ideas and inspiration. Nonetheless, I tend to put my ASCD member books in pile to be skimmed at some future point and then read carefully only if the skim captivates me. Well, it's the truth; there are are other things I like to read more.<br /><br />Jacobs' introduction to <span style="font-style:italic;">Curriculum 21</span> starts perilously close to edu-porn, about which I've <a href="http://www.newprogressivism.org/2010/02/edu-porn.html">written earlier</a>, starting with the usual 21st-century indictments of the work writers seem to enjoy accusing many schools of continuing to do: "What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995?"<br /><br />But quickly enough the justification and the overview give way to Chapter One, "A New Essential Curriculum for a New Time," that lays out an excellent case for change. In the following chapters Jacobs even suggests an entirely practical process for initiating and working through this change.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />For the rest of <span style="font-style:italic;">Curriculum 21</span>, Jacobs and the books other contributors--including Steven Wilmarth, Vivian Stewart, Tim Tyson, Frank W. Baker, David Niguidula, Jaimie P. Cloud, <a href="http://novemberlearning.com/">Alan November</a>, Bill Sheskey, <a href="http://www.instituteforhabitsofmind.com/founding_directors">Arthur L. Costa, and Bena Kallick</a>--make not only the case for incorporating the full menu of 21st-century skills--including 21st-century habits of mind, from Costa and Kallick--but also some plausible, do-able ideas for doing the work.<br /><br />It's pretty extraordinary: powerful case statements by the educational leaders most associated with the program elements generally regarded as the foundation stones of 21st-century curriculum, written in a style that is neither shrill nor hectoring. <span style="font-style:italic;">Curriculum 21</span> offers a rare thing, which is a mature, measured perspective on the best practices that will inform the work of schools in the decades to come.<br /><br />What I like best is that the authors, Jacobs and all the rest, write in a way that feels grounded in the educational history that has come before, incorporating the new understandings of cognition, child development, and curriculum and assessment design that educators have gained in the last half-century or so. They even suggest that students and teachers are human beings with a range of responses to change--and that the process of change needs to acknowledge this. Yes, it's progressive, even New Progressive.<br /><br />So, to haul out a cliche that seems especially apt, if you read only one book on 21st-century education this year--and there are plenty of choices around--check out <span style="font-style:italic;">Curriculum 21</span>. You will actually want to read, and learn from, this one.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-61698360055082663402010-02-03T09:00:00.003-05:002010-02-03T10:08:14.368-05:00Edu-PornA <a href="http://toxicculture.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/edu-porn-on-the-nashville-scene/">smart blogger at <span style="font-style:italic;">Toxic Culture</span></a> correctly identified as "edu-porn" those feel-good articles and films that show a well-meaning rebel thinking outside the box and transforming schools and classrooms, one caring little environment at a time. Ever since Mr. Daddy-O decided to come back for another round of teaching would-be juvenile delinquents in the 1956 film <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Jungle">Blackboard Jungle</a></span>, audiences and voters have been comforted to know that one person can make a difference in schools, at least until they leave (as Evan Hunter, author of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Blackboard Jungle</span>, the novel on which the film was based, did after 17 days as a teacher).<br /><br />But there is another kind of edu-porn, the sadomasochist side of the genre, that gets an awful lot of airplay these days and that must offer the same frisson of pleasure to its purveyors that those teacher-savior stories provide. I am talking about the mountains of statistics--seldom represented by the same numbers twice, so it seems--that "prove" that American children are falling ever farther behind their peers in other nations, particularly those with growing economies in Asia. These numbers are regularly hauled out by commentators on the right and increasingly the left as evidence that our schools are failing, our children are doomed, and our society and nation are plummeting into irrelevancy.<br /><br />I don't even care whether these numbers, based on all kinds of comparative test data, are right or wrong; in the aggregate I know that they are real and alarming. What concerns me is that I have long sensed a kind of weird, cruel "I-told-you-so" pleasure among some of those who are most eager to tell us that the children of China, India, Singapore, Japan, and even Finland (Finland!) are soon going to be our superiors in the global economic and political order; better start learning Mandarin so that we'll have a few interlocutors who will be able to speak with our new masters!<br /><br />Often enough the blame for this trend, which goes back to the post-Sputnik era in its most statistical and malevolent form, seems directed at whatever version of "progressive education" the blamer has created in his or her own mind and doesn't like. <br /><span class="fullpost"><br />Mathematics instruction--which is clearly in need of improvement in the U.S., with Singapore and Japanese models offering tremendous promise--usually tops the list of curricular and pedagogical culprits, but "multiculturalism," project-based instruction, school schedules and calendars, and of course anything associated with the word "self-esteem" are among the usual suspects. I think that I occasionally catch a whiff of regret among the most vitriolic of education critics that the American education system has invited girls, and then students of color, into the classrooms where white boys once reigned, and of course there is the strange and apparently countervailing abhorrence of "elites" and elitism that lets the harshest critics have it both ways--hating both the education system and those who have succeeded at a high level within it.<br /><br />Clearly those who have expressed hope that the Obama presidency will fail--regardless of all the human suffering that would accompany the kind of failure for which they most hope--are a model for a kind of political <span style="font-style:italic;">schadenfreude</span> that is equally turned on by the idea that American schools are failing and that American children are victims of this failure. This stance lets those who are just plain cynical claim at least equal air time with those who propose legitimate or at least well-meaning solutions, from charter schools to vouchers to serious reform. In the avalanche of dreadful numbers, it's hard to see who is offering real hope and who are just gratified by watching educators and the initiatives of the past three or five or twenty decades twist in the wind.<br /><br />Of late I have noted from the more progressive side of the field some of the same. In particular, some of the strongest (and in some cases most accurate) advocates around technology in education and "21st-century skills" can sometimes be heard pronouncing the same kind of doom on education and educators, suggesting that the "failure" to move forward quickly enough toward a more tech-informed, more New Progressive approach to teaching and learning is a kind of crime being practiced on children. Like angry educational conservatives who believe they know it all and take pleasure in pointing out the failings of education as it is currently practiced, the more shrill voices on the other end of the spectrum risk turning their critiques into the kind of splenetic, empty rhetoric that makes them feel good and impedes real progress.<br /><br />Sadomasochistic edu-porn is not, apparently, the province of the right only, but I hope that those who are most sincere and thoughtful in their efforts to reform the system can restrain their delight in pointing out what's wrong and focus rather on moving the American educational system toward what is effective and what best meets the real needs of children.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-61966086634207988932009-11-06T08:14:00.002-05:002009-11-06T08:30:24.561-05:00The Intentional Teacher, at lastI'm pleased to mention here that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Intentional Teacher: Forging a Great Career in the Independent School Classroom<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span> is at last available. Although the book can be ordered by phone directly from the publisher, <a href="http://www.avocus.com/index.html">Avocus Publishing</a> (800-345-6665; their website is undergoing renovation), the best way to purchase at this point is from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Intentional-Teacher-Peter-Gow/dp/1890765031/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256946899&sr=8-1">Amazon</a>.<br /><br />The book is intended for aspiring and working teachers as well as for administrators, mentors, and others who hire and support teachers in their schools. There are chapters on<br />* what it takes to be a teacher<br />* finding a job<br />* getting to know students<br />* classroom management<br />* planning<br />* setting standards<br />* feedback<br />* working with families<br />* diversity and equity<br />* advising and supervising outside the classroom<br />* coaching<br />* child and adolescent development<br />* curriculum and pedagogy<br />* professional behavior<br />* the teacher's role in the school<br />* career paths<br /><br />There is a resource section for each chapter and a few useful templates--unit design, project planning, daily planning--that should be useful to schools.<br /><br />The educational philosophy underlying the book is New Progressive in every way; it's about building relationships with students and creating learning experiences that are purposeful, engaging, exciting, and challenging. The independent school focus is really about making the most of one's personal and professional capacities in an environment that often calls upon teachers to play many roles in students' lives.<br /><br />The sticker price is $26.95. Avocus has produced a number of books on independent school issues, and I have to say they have put this one together very nicely.Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-87610541175227309332009-11-05T17:10:00.006-05:002009-11-06T07:11:05.428-05:00Best practice or travesty?A while back I went to the <a href="http://www.progressiveed.org/">Progressive Education Network</a>'s biennial gathering, held this year in D.C. (well, Bethesda, actually). It was an interesting experience to say the least, and perhaps one I'm willing to wait a couple of years to have again. <br /><br />I had been invited to present on The New Progressivism, which I did both as a proponent and as a reporter of what I see as going on in the field. (You can find the PowerPoint of my presentation <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/pgow3/the-new-progressivism-is-here">here</a>; I apologize that Slideshare wasn't able to take in the rather nice old display font I used for the titles, leaving some oddly proportioned text here and there.)<br /><br />First, though, there was the opening ceremony and keynote, given by the redoubtable <a href="http://www.childrensdefense.org/who-is-cdf/cdf-leadership-staff/marian-wright-edelman/">Marian Wright Edelman</a>. Ms. Edelman was late for the event, having been testifying at the capitol all day on health care issues and children. Not a problem, of course.<br /><br />What was a problem, at least for me, was the kind of giddy glee I sensed in the crowd as the schedule unraveled--"in the spirit of progressive education," as one of the emcees said while filling in the time.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">No! No! No!<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> The idea that progressive education is some kind of loopy, anarchic "go with the flow" version of education is exactly what makes much harder the work of those of us who are trying to convince serious people that progressive education, done well by serious people, is serious. Sure, things go wrong, and sure, as educators we work hard to be responsive to student interests and teachable moments, but let's not start with the assumption that it's all going to get weird, anyway.<br /><br />The expectation that progressive education is when things don't go as planned--or maybe they aren't planned at all--undermines pretty much everything that serious progressive educators from John Dewey forward have been trying to do. Progressive teaching, the crafting of educational experiences that may feel fluid and spontaneous but that are in fact extremely focused on achieving specific goals, is hard work.<br /><br />But the next day, at my presentation, things got a bit more strange.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />A very nice and thoughtful group of listeners paid polite attention as I went through my spiel. I thought the slides looked nice. So I wasn't quite prepared for a pretty personal tirade from one attendee, who accused me of a kind of intellectual totalitarianism, "pushing" "my" New Progressivism to the exclusion of all other kinds of education.<br /><br />Jeepers! Hadn't meant to do that. Thought I had been talking about the ways in which some of the thinking of the Old Ones from the Progressive Education Association era had evolved, informed by new understandings about cognition, development, and social issues, into something new that preserved the intent of the founding generations but that used new science and new pedagogical principles to strengthen the educational impact of the work. I had also wanted to convey a sense that this kind of thinking about curriculum, kids, and teaching is becoming pervasive in many schools that are forward-thinking and outside the constraints of the standardized testing monster.<br /><br />One listener helpfully suggested that what I was saying was that New Progressive teaching is pretty much best practice these days. Yes! That's it; although I'm glad I didn't use the superlative term there or the totalitarian brand might have burned even deeper. An Australian educator wanted to know why what I was talking about even merited discussion; it's the way things have been done Down Under for a while, as we know.<br /><br />Thankfully, I guess, the conversation in the all-white group devolved into some talk about diversity, and everyone could agree that it posed serious challenges for schools. Then time was up, and I was off to catch my train.<br /><br />On the way home, and since then, I've been wondering what inspired the philippic and the defensiveness. At best, I might think I hadn't been clear enough in stating my thesis, which was just to talk about how the ways had changed even as the intent remained the same, Dewey to Sizer.<br /><br />At worst, though, I had to wonder whether the anarchic strain of progressive education as well as the political strain that grew up in the Free School era of the 1960s remains at the core of what many practitioners of "progressive education" believe. The idea, then, that scientific discipline might be imposed on the "child-centered," "go with the flow," "we love kids and you don't" version of progressive education that is regularly ridiculed and condemned in the popular media might just look like being co-opted to folks who got into this work in a certain time period.<br /><br />And of course, being co-opted--progressive practice as BEST practice; horrors!--would be a terrible thing, selling out your values to a host of straight-line, "traditional" schools whose faculties could hardly appreciate the spirit and genius of kids as progressive educators do. It would be, if you were a true believer in the idea that progressive education meant a kind of affectionate disorder, nothing less than a travesty.<br /><br />Well, I think that the practices that I call New Progressive are indeed natural outgrowths of the work done by the "old" progressives of the pre-tie-dye era. I also happen to believe that the host of straight-line, "traditional" schools that have begun to grab hold of and thoughtfully, mindfully implement New Progressive practices are on the right track and that what they do every day both defines and refines what can be generally regarded as best practice in education.<br /><br />I guess I should on the record here as understanding that there are many kinds of education, many kinds of kids, and many kinds of schools. I understand that some kinds of education are based on extreme structure and that these systems work for many kids; and that's more than okay--it's necessary. New Progressivism isn't the only approach to education, but I think that it happens to be a very good one. What I like about it, and what I respect about the approaches of, say, KIPP and Waldorf schools, is that, properly executed, all are the product of thought and planning. The spirit of New Progressive education is a spirit of purpose that accepts serendipity, not a spirit of serendipity alone.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-50761518501119507232009-10-26T17:02:00.003-04:002009-10-26T17:19:36.778-04:00Theodore SizerI would happily fill this space with a tribute to the late Theodore Sizer, but a colleague has written one that cannot be surpassed insofar as it says all the things that I think most need saying about our fallen comrade and leader. So check out <a href="http://21k12blog.net/2009/10/22/losing-another-lion-ted-sizer-1932-2009/">"Losing Another Lion"</a> by Jonathan Martin. The rest of the 21K12 blog is pretty great, as well.<br /><br />What I will say about Ted Sizer is that his work on school reform came along just as many of us seemed to be ready to enter into a comfortable if perhaps a little lackluster academic middle age. The Horace books shook us up, and the Coalition gave us a set of ideals to which we might aspire. Later writing, such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Students-Are-Watching-Schools-Contract/dp/0807031216">The Students Are Watching</a> and <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=9780300109771">The Red Pencil</a>, inspired even the least reflective among us to ponder our work deeply and powerfully. Along the way we discovered the complementary genius of Nancy Faust Sizer, Ted's estimable spouse and collaborator.<br /><br />We will miss Ted Sizer, but thankfully his legacy will live on for generations of schoolchildren yet unborn.Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-19125283162789749232009-09-21T13:38:00.004-04:002009-09-21T14:07:32.421-04:00The Old Progressivism, reduxOn my office wall for many years I've had posted a copy of "The Principles of Progressive Education," a seven-point 1924 document written on behalf of the Progressive Education Association by, I am told, Eugene Randolph Smith, a progressive educator who was founding head of both the Park School of Baltimore and Beaver Country Day School, outside Boston.<br /><br />Mirroring the troubling national rise in politically intemperate speech, I have noted in recent weeks that the U.S. citations on the Google Alerts I receive on "progressive education" are getting weirder and more shrill. Progressive education, as usual, is blamed for all kinds of things and related to atheism, ignorance, socialism, and even (my late favorite) to a progressive educational plot to decrease literacy in America--the blogger who came up with <span style="font-style:italic;">that</span> one found a Dewey quote, or rather a quote from a book about Dewey, that supported this wacky notion. So much for rigorous use of evidence.<br /><br />I thought it might be time to trot out the 1924 Principles, which graced the inside cover of the PEA's magazine for five years or so and which pretty seriously fail to live up to any of the exciting, crazy things that are being imputed to it by 2009 blogsters.<br /><br />I'll quote the entire document after the break.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />"The Principles of Progressive Education<br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">I. Freedom to Develop Naturally.</span> The conduct of the pupil should be governed by himself according to the social needs of his community, rather than by arbitrary laws. Full opportunity for initiative and self-expression should be provided, together with an environment rich in interesting material that is available for the free use of every pupil. <br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">II. Interest, the Motive of All Work. </span> Interest should be satisfied and developed through: (1) Direct and indirect contact with the world and its activities, and use of the experience thus gained. (2) Application of knowledge gained, and correlation between different subjects. (3) The consciousness of achievement. <br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">III. The Teacher a Guide, Not a Task-Master.</span> It is essential that teachers should believe in the aims and general principles of Progressive Education and that they should have latitude for the development of initiative and originality. Progressive teachers will encourage the use of all the senses, training the pupils in both observation and judgment; and instead of hearing recitations only, will spend most of the time teaching how to use various sources of information, including life activities as well as books; how to reason about the information thus acquired; and how to express forcefully and logically the conclusions reached. Ideal teaching conditions demand that classes be small, especially in the elementary school years. <br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">IV. Scientific Study of Pupil Development.</span> School records should not be confined to the marks given by teachers to show the advancement of the pupils in their study of subjects, but should also include both objective and subjective reports on those physical, mental, moral and social characteristics which affect both school and adult life, and which can be influenced by the school and the home. Such records should be used as a guide for the treatment of each pupil, and should also serve to focus the attention of the teacher on the all-important work of development rather than on simply teaching subject matter. <br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">V. Greater Attention to All that Affects the Child's Physical Development.</span> One of the first considerations of Progressive Education is the health of the pupils. Much more room in which to move about, better light and air, clean and well ventilated buildings, easier access to the out-of-doors and greater use of it, are all necessary. There should be frequent use of adequate playgrounds. The teachers should observe closely the physical conditions of each pupil and, in cooperation with the home, make abounding health the first objective of childhood. <br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">VI. Co-operation Between School and Home to Meet the Needs of Child Life.</span> The school should provide, with the home, as much as is possible of all that the natural interests and activities of the child demand, especially during the elementary school years. These conditions can come about only through intelligent co-operation between parents and teachers. <br /><br />"<span style="font-weight:bold;">VII. The Progressive School a Leader in Educational Movements.</span> The Progressive School should be a leader in educational movements. It should be a laboratory where new ideas, if worthy, meet encouragement; where tradition alone does not rule, but the best of the past is leavened with the discoveries of today, and the result is freely added to the sum of educational knowledge."<br /><br />I won't comment at length here other than to say I don't see anything crazy here, or for that matter many things that are far removed from what has become educational best practice in the age of New Progressive education. Don't think there's anything here that most of us wouldn't happily and proudly stand by today, 85 years after this was written. Perhaps what's most disturbing is that many of these ideas would seem new to some of our colleagues.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-15473691648267450772009-09-16T08:00:00.006-04:002009-09-16T08:42:04.732-04:00You've Gotta Be Sincere, But There's MoreHad an interesting response from a reader (and former student) to the previous post in reference to the writing I've been doing on school sustainability. She is about to start a job at a nature center that works with a number of independent schools, and she is excited about some of their initiatives in the context of the broader rubric of school sustainability--as long, she says, as "it turns out to be sincere and holistic and not just a gimmick."<br /><br />She hits the nail on the head, I think, at least from the perception side. Educators everywhere can be accused of grabbing onto any number of great-sounding ideas--the gimmick du jour, it sometimes seems--and of then failing to continue the work that would turn the idea into a sustainable and sustaining part of the practice and learning culture of their institution. Thus do good ideas shrivel into "gimmicks."<br /><br />I like to believe that the issue is almost never one of sincerity or a failure of holistic thinking. Rather, educational ideas that are bruited about in schools and then fail to take root are almost always victims of a kind of institutional ADD, an almost extreme distractibility that stems from schools' failure to discipline themselves to stand firm in their missions and values as well as from the seductive allure of so many new currents in educational thought--what my boss quotes a consultant as calling "the tyranny of good ideas."<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />In recent years good ideas, many of which are part and parcel of New Progressive core practice, have swept through schools like Southern California wildfires, causing much consternation and giving birth to a host of committees and strategic goals around technology, globalization, environmental practice, curriculum, service learning, character education--you name it. All of these are good ideas, deeply rooted in sound educational thought and a profound belief in the capacities of children and the promise of schools. How could a thoughtful educator or a forward-thinking school turn its back on any of them?<br /><br />If it sounds as though I am about to advocate doing just that, hold on. Earlier I made reference to mission and core values, and if a school is going to go "whole hog" in any direction, mission and values dictate what that direction must be. Rather than become an environmental school, or a laptop school, or a global school, or a character-education school, an institution must be the kind of school it is at its core, in its heart, and in its heritage. All the good ideas in the world, pasted on or plunked into the program just because they're good ideas, won't make a wobbly school sustainable or a weak school strong. <br /><br />My commentator's word "holistic," I think, holds the key to doing it right. Find the parts of the good ideas that resonate with the core and that can be thoughtfully and intentionally integrated into practice, and make them work. Oftentimes they will supplant or replace existing work, and sometimes they will supplement it in a way that enriches current practice. The work may be hard for the school and its teachers and challenging to its students, but if (and only if) it is OF A PIECE with what the school already does and stands for, it will embed itself sincerely and holistically in the fabric and life of the school. It won't be just another abandoned gimmick receding in the rear-view mirror as the school careens into an uncertain future but rather a part of the engine that drives the school forward on a course about which there is shared understanding and excitement.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-46145114945683129992009-09-13T19:10:00.004-04:002009-09-13T19:42:38.301-04:00New Progressive = Good businessIt's been almost six months since I've blogged here, and I apologize to anyone who has been waiting.<br /><br />My "unassigned time" in the past half year has largely been spent doing some writing for the <a href="http://www.nais.org/sustainable/index.cfm?ItemNumber=151713">National Association of Independent Schools Financially Sustainable Schools project</a>. I've been talking to CFOs, admission folks, development officers, and school heads, working to develop a set of principles and best practices for independent schools that would like to make it through a another decade or two. Not surprisingly, a fair number of my conversations have begun as inquiries into financial management.<br /><br />But, funniest thing, the more I talked to the most creative and reflective people, the more I found myself on the familiar ground of New Progressivist thinking. Smart, forward-thinking schools that are actually DOING SOMETHING about improving their programs and professional practice`tend to be the ones that are thriving. Schools that are sitting on their hands or (worse) resting on their laurels are the ones worried about enrollment and whether they're going to have to lay off more teachers. <br /><span class="fullpost"><br />I have found myself talking with educators who have discovered in Multiple-Intelligence theory the keys to better curriculum design and who have successfully challenged even the most senior of faculties to attend to new understandings about assessment and evaluation so that their schools will continue to be the centers of excellence that annually bring bright, motivated, and intellectually engaged students into their classrooms--kids who become more engaged as their teachers become more innovative and intentional.<br /><br />I have spoken with development officers who understand that schools have to be active, vibrant places where resources are used not just to make people more comfortable but to ramp up the level of the educational experiences and challenges that make students go home excited and even exhilarated--feelings that become the kind of word of mouth marketing campaign that no amount of money can buy.<br /><br />I've spent hours on the phone with business officers who understand deeply not just the operational nuts and bolts that allow their schools to thrive but who are excited by the missions and values of the schools where they work--values that embrace taking care of the school community but that also acknowledge the higher quest for social justice and educational equity.<br /><br />Smart school leaders everywhere are seeing the clear connections between innovative curriculum, the leveraging of technology, global thinking, and Green awareness. These are the connections that not only mean "doing the right thing" educationally but that also energize teachers, students, families--and even donors.<br /><br />I'm just sorry that NAIS membership is needed to get access to much of the work that has come out of this project, including <a href="http://www.nais.org/sustainable/article.cfm?ItemNumber=152100">my latest big piece, "Alive and Well: What It Takes to Thrive in Hard Times."</a> Over the next few weeks I will try to offer here a summary of the key findings.<br /><br />When I first jumped into this work I assumed that it would be an interesting task that wouldn't have much to do with my New Progressive initiatives. Now that I've really dug around into what it means for a school to be sustainable, I'm ecstatic to think that sustainability in 2009 is inherently New Progressive. How cool is that?!!!<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-1744511725495898462009-04-17T14:24:00.005-04:002009-04-17T15:27:13.889-04:00Innovation--then and nowI've been away for far too long, caught up in some writing projects having to do with school leadership in tough financial times. In the end what is common sense in school management now has largely been common sense forever, although there has been a tendency in recent years even for school folks to toss some common sense out the window. Everything may have seemed a little too easy, and "keeping on keeping on" became the watchword rather than, "let's plan thoughtfully for a future that may be different."<br /><br />If nothing else, the financial crisis has made a few people and a few schools think about how they might conceive of and do their work differently. I've been listening to people talk to me about the need for all schools, not just those who identify themselves as progressive, to have an authentic community purpose as well as strong, innovative programs to truly differentiate themselves from other institutions and to establish their identities as centers of educational excellence.<br /><br />A while back I was speaking with the head of a school with an old and very established "winter term" program. Some of us are old enough to remember when these programs--usually a few weeks in December of January devoted to mini-courses, travel programs, and other wholesale departures from the "normal" curriculum--were all the rage. I spent three years in the 70s teaching in a middle school where we stopped pretty much everything and threw all the students and teachers, grades 5 through 9, into intensive and experiential "projects" around such themes as "American agriculture" and "Life in the U.S. in 1840." It was a blast; I learned most of what I ever knew in those days about creating curriculum from having had a role in designing these programs.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />Well, my point before I started reminiscing was that this head commented that in some ways the school was resting on its laurels with this program, now probably in its fourth decade. The school has big plans at the moment to move forward in some truly exciting ways around curriculum and pedagogy. "Doing the new work is sort of a way of honoring the work that was done by people who put winter term together years ago," was the head's message.<br /><br />I thought, Brilliant! Yes! Thirty years ago a new generation of teachers poured their hearts and souls into a wave of curriculum innovation. Even though some of it was conceived and executed by rookies like me, and no doubt flawed in all kinds of ways by the intuitive and sometimes haphazard way we planned, much more was based on the best thinking of the time, whether the inspiration was Jerome Bruner, Robert Coles, or Jonathan Kozol. (It's easy enough to see the genesis of a strong predilection toward social justice here.) <br /><br />Much of this work was brought to a thudding halt in the financially dreadful early Reagan era, but the programs that survived--a pet curriculum here, a favorite project there, winter terms at a few score schools--had legs because they were sustained by passionate teachers and because they resonated with kids. In time some of these have become as traditional and fixed in their form and content as a Thanksgiving pageant or or an awards convocation, but some have evolved with the times and are as vital today as they were when they were devised by dewy-eyed baby boomers with just enough experience and confidence to think that programs could change the way their students understood the world.<br /><br />Now, as this head of school was saying, the next generation of educators must throw their hearts and minds into new strategies, new practices, new programs. With schools now being led by many of those idealistic Boomers and a whole host of new, research-based understandings about how children learn and about how communities function, the potential exists for a tidal wave of innovative thinking about what schools are and what they can accomplish.<br /><br />When schools (independent schools, in particular) start talking about ways to truly serve their communities, to open their doors and programs to their neighbors, and when schools are willing to embrace whole new concepts of curriculum content and design, innovation has established itself again. Just as a major financial scare put paid to much of the innovation of the 70s, our own recession seems to have motivated schools to start finding ways to make their missions, idealistic as they might be, real.<br /><br />It makes me wonder whether there is some subtly contrary pendulum effect in economic uncertainty. The boom years of the 60s and early 70s gave us innovation in the form of a kind of progressive education that was fairly quickly neutered by the double-digit inflation and unemployment of the early Reagan Revolution, and now were are seeing smart schools using the current crisis as an impetus to embrace the social and curricular principles of the New Progressivism even more strongly. <br /><br />Whatever meta-historical forces may be at work (or maybe it's just the Internet, for all I know), the result is encouraging. Schools are looking at new ways to be and new ways to do their work, and it's all quite exciting. I'm sure there are schools out there whose panicky boards want them to revert to some notion of education in the 1950s (which we seem to cling to as some kind of Golden Age, before things got complicated), but the best school leaders are responding to the exigencies of the day even as they honor the work of their predecessors by aggressively seeking better ways to accomplish their schools' missions.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-16871630557877996622009-03-07T16:23:00.004-05:002009-03-07T18:16:43.416-05:00What is great curriculum?Ever since <a href="http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm">Jerome Bruner</a> and his followers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and elsewhere began thinking about curriculum in new ways half a century ago, the word "curriculum" has meant something more than a an orderly collection of facts to be learned in order. Most educational leaders have embraced constructivist principles, refined over time to include a host of concepts from "planning backwards" to authentic assessment and experiential learning. The Big Topics of our day--multiculturalism, sustainability, globalization--have become interwoven with traditional subject areas, and concepts like "teaching for understanding" and "habits of mind" are part of the argot of good teaching, whether in New Progressivist schools or traditional ones.<br /><br />But the question remains: What makes <span style="font-weight:bold;">great<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> curriculum? What separates excellent curriculum (and assessment) and the outstanding, lasting learning that it generates from ho-hum, average or poor quality learning designs and experiences?<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about the <a href="http://www.independentcurriculum.org">Independent Curriculum Group</a> and its efforts to support schools that want to create their own high-level curricula and separate themselves from the College Board's Advanced Placement program. In yesterday's <span style="font-style:italic;">Washington Post</span>, columnist Jay Mathews, an AP enthusiast, let loose a <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/03/answering_your_questions_20_wa.html">surprisingly shrill--for Mathews, who is usually pretty measured even when standing up for his favorite ideas--critique of some of the ICG's assertions</a> in a spirited defense of AP curricula. <br /><br />The issue, whether for Mathews or the ICG or any thoughtful educator, is the nature of quality curriculum. Educators have done a wonderful job of designing curriculum, and we've disseminated a world of terrific ideas among ourselves, but we have done a lousy job of engaging the public at large in understanding what quality means. For most people, "excellent curriculum" means lots of homework, the mastery of plenty of facts--the more obscure the better--and standardized tests to measure the result.<br /><br />It's poor stuff, and we owe it to the students that we teach and to generations yet to come to explain ourselves better.<br /><br />So often curriculum, and education in general, is seen as a succession of either/or issues: factual mastery or fluffy opinionating, bubble tests or fatuous essays, old math or New, phonics or whole language. <br /><br />We know, however, that our work is all about complexity--the many kinds of minds in our classrooms, the material we teach, and the ways that we must teach it. Complexity, as well know, doesn't sell newspapers or broadcast media advertising time, and it almost never, alas, wins elections. <br /><br />So we need to agree on some basic principles of excellent curriculum, and we need to make the story simple, and I'd like to propose a start.<br /><br />Excellent curriculum, to borrow and reapply some terms from <a href="http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~clg/aboutus2.html#tonywagner">Tony Wagner</a>'s work, must be rigorous (although I like the term "intellectually challenging" a whole lot more, because it doesn't sound like a form of torture or the stiffening of a corpse's joints) and relevant. <br /><br />We've also been reading lately about so-called "21st-century" skills that need to be included in excellent curriculum: collaboration, creativity, problem-solving, and all the skills required to make use of current and emerging technologies. Good teaching has included these elements forever, I think--back to Socrates, who wasn't exactly a slouch when it came to getting his entourage to think in new ways about difficult matters and whose dialogues are almost all group discussions. Collaboration as part of learning isn't exactly a new idea, any more than the application of the latest technology. Whatever the provenance of these ideas, though, they must be included, I think, under the rubric of "relevance."<br /><br />Contextual relevance seems to bother many people when the concept is applied to curriculum. It's as if authenticity is somehow antithetical to actual learning, that problems or questions stripped of any relationship to the real world are somehow more real, harder, more about learning than others. No matter if every other aspect of human experience and endeavor is anchored in real life, "real-life" curriculum is suspect--perhaps the more so if it's connected to those 21st-century skills. Nevertheless, it must be regarded as an essential characteristic of excellent curriculum.<br /><br />The Independent Curriculum Group can earn its salt, I think, by becoming a locus for serious discussions of serious curriculum. There's a lot of good stuff around, but what's missing are some benchmarks for excellence--not just for top-level courses equivalent to the aspirations of, say, Advanced Placement or the <a href="http://www.ibo.org/">International Baccalaureate</a>, but for every discipline at every level. <br /><br />Intellectually challenging and relevant--to the individual needs as well as the lives of students--seem fundamental to me as characteristics of excellent curriculum. <br /><br />These sound simple enough, but the next steps, adding detail to flesh out benchmarks by discipline and level, are of course much harder--more complex.<br /><br />What do readers think?<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-15763887647152968772009-02-21T15:12:00.004-05:002009-02-21T15:24:14.967-05:00The Right Questions about Advanced Placement coursesFollowing up on the previous post relating to the <a href="http://www.independentcurriculum.org">Independent Curriculum Group</a> and the Advanced Placement program, here is a list of questions I generated a few years ago for a presentation on the subject for the <a href="http://www.nais.org">National Association of Independent Schools</a>:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE RIGHT QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT AN ADVANCED PLACEMENT PROGRAM AT YOUR SCHOOL<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br /><br />1. What resources—people, time, space, materials—do AP courses require?<br />2. What are the opportunity costs of directing these resources at an AP program?<br />3. Does the AP curriculum challenge your students in the most appropriate possible ways?<br />4. Is your AP program built on barriers? Do your policies exclude students from certain high-level courses that are proclaimed to be the “best” or most desirable in the school?<br />5. Given a roomful of motivated and curious students and a passionate, expert instructor, does an AP curriculum offer the best possible learning experience that could be devised?<br />6. Does the AP program offer courses whose content and methodologies embody your school’s particular values and mission? <br />7. Do the content and methodologies of AP courses reflect your school’s commitment to diversity?<br />8. Is the “vertical team” approach to AP instruction in certain disciplines consonant with the philosophical and developmental nature of your departmental curricula? <br />9. Do you use a winnowing or sieving process to make AP classes the apex of a pyramid of achievement or of aptitude? <br />10. Who is “winnowed” out of taking AP courses? Do you track this, both individually and by group membership?<br />(Click the link below for Questions 11 through 35)<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />11. Do you have the confidence to promote students for college matriculation based on the internal standards established by the faculty at your school?<br />12. What is your school’s philosophical and practical commitment to curricular depth over breadth?<br />13. To what degree does the existence of an AP program at your school reflect the anxieties of constituents other than your faculty and students?<br />14. Is the AP program at your school designed to provide a challenging advanced curriculum or just to help your more ambitious students get into college?<br />15. Have you developed your policies around students enrolled in courses labeled “AP” taking the Advanced Placement examination based on the individual needs of students, or on anxieties around perceived institutional integrity?<br />16. Does your faculty have the expertise to design highly challenging and engaging advanced courses on their own, or does the use of an externally driven curriculum serve in lieu of helping them gain that expertise?<br />17. When was the last time you heard that a graduate of your school had used an accumulation of Advanced Placement credits to “place out” of a year of college?<br />18. Do you track how often graduates of your school use Advanced Placement credit to place up into, rather than place out of, courses in college?<br />19. How are students assessed and evaluated for their work in existing AP courses? <br />20. Are your AP teachers teaching a subject, or are they teaching to a test?<br />21. Does your school weight the grades given students in AP courses in computing GPA or class rank? Have you collected and analyzed data to assure yourself that this weighting is equitable?<br />22. Is teaching AP in your school considered a prestigious assignment? Because it’s “AP,” or because teachers truly believe it is the best curriculum?<br />23. Do you believe that having an AP program adds luster to your entire curriculum? If so, do you then offer AP course enrollment to every student?<br />24. Who pays for students to take Advanced Placement examinations at your school?<br />25. Where would you begin in the development of an internally designed program that would replace Advanced Placement courses?<br />26. If you do not already have Advanced Placement courses, are you afraid that not having them will jeopardize your students’ chances at college admission?<br />27. If you do already offer Advanced Placement courses, are you afraid that discontinuing them will jeopardize your students’ chances at college admission?<br />28. If you do already offer AP courses, what do you anticipate the public costs would be of supplanting them with internally designed courses?<br />29. What data or evidence would be helpful to your school in your circumstances in deciding to discontinue or not implement an AP program? How would you collect the data?<br />30. To which constituencies would you be most answerable if you were to consider either discontinuing or not implementing an AP program? How would you address their concerns?<br />31. Do the concerns of Advanced Placement teachers in your school inhibit movement toward schedule reform that would otherwise benefit all students?<br />32. Do public schools in your area offer a more established and broader array of AP courses than your school is able to? If so, are your efforts to maintain your own program underplaying your school’s unique strengths and values in an arena where it may be difficult or impossible to establish a competitive advantage, anyway?<br />33. Does the perceived pressure of “having” to have AP courses on the transcript drain good, excited students away from arts, electives, and other challenging courses that don’t carry the AP label?<br />34. What would your school do when faced with the dilemma of having a sign-up for an AP course that was very small (and thus “expensive” to staff) or very large (and thus necessitating either paring down or adding a section)?<br />35. Does the calendar of Advanced Placement examinations in May impede the development of meaningful end-of-year programs for seniors at your school? Or does it otherwise interfere with other worthy or potentially valuable programs at your school?<br /><br />I'd really like your thoughts and comments on these questions. To engage more deeply with this issue, visit and perhaps even join the <a href="http://independentcurriculum.ning.com">Independent Curriculum Group Ning</a>.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-89235734448364352832009-02-18T09:06:00.006-05:002009-02-18T10:32:58.154-05:00Independent Curriculum, High Stakes Testing, and the New ProgressivismA few years back educators at a number of independent schools, many but not all of them with Progressive roots and New Progressivist leanings, and a handful of public ones became concerned that the College Board's Advanced Placement program was exerting a dead hand on their curricula, especially at the upper levels. For many students in selective schools who intend on applying to the most competitive universities, the number of AP courses listed on a transcript (regardless of actual AP examination scores) has become a true measure of worth. By this standard, a student with six courses is three times as good as a student with two. In some schools the competition to enroll in AP classes, which at many schools are limited in enrollment and essentially "by invitation only," has become a mania.<br /><br />Enter the <a href="http://www.independentcurriculum.org">Independent Curriculum Group</a>. The brainchild of executive director Bruce Hammond, a former college counselor at a progressive school in New Mexico, the ICG "has declared its independence from standardized tests that dictate curriculum. We are part of a growing movement of nationally recognized college preparatory schools that have either dropped or de-emphasized the College Board Advanced Placement Program." (In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of the Independent Curriculum Group's board.)<br /><br />Click the "Read more" link to learn more about the Advanced Placement program and the Independent Curriculum Group.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />The Advanced Placement program began a few generations ago largely as a way for the best students at competitive schools (many of them independent) to get a leg-up on first-year courses at Ivy League and other selective colleges. Over time, the program has evolved into a vast program in which public and private schools alike have piled Advanced Placement courses into their curricula as a way of demonstrating rigor and quality. The more AP courses a school offers, the better, and the more students who take AP examinations (regardless of results), the higher the school will be ranked. Politicians, the media, and local school boards have embraced the program as the answer to their prayers for a one-stop solution to all their educational image problems. In 1987 the film <span style="font-style:italic;">Stand and Deliver</span>, whatever its message of hope for the prospects of inner-city students, glorified the AP program as the last bastion of hard-nosed, old-school, teach-to-the-test instruction that public has long equated with educational excellence (at least when it applies to other people's children).<br /><br />We know what has happened with regard to standardized testing since then. We also know what has happened to the Advanced Placement program: burgeoning growth that has actually required the College Board to institute course audits to protect the integrity of its Advanced Placement and AP trademarks even as the number of kids taking the $86-a-pop examinations has skyrocketed. If you're sitting in a nice office at the Board, you have to feel good.<br /><br />But if you're at a school where teachers are receiving continuous training in curriculum and assessment design and where teachers are educated as subject matter specialists--that is, if you're at most New Progressive independent schools--Advanced Placement courses can look like a large step backward. Add to this the various strange and mostly undemocratic policies that have grown up around access to Advanced Placement courses, and you have a program that <br /><br />1) tends to be built around certified, teach-to-the-test methodologies and content (although to be fair the best AP teachers manage to make their courses fresh and exciting), limiting opportunities for students and teachers to take advantage of teachable moments, multiple points of view, and spontaneous thought and curiosity;<br /><br />2) is offered only to students who have already jumped through some hoops to achieve enrollment and who tend not to represent the overall demographic of American secondary students; remember that the "conflict" in <span style="font-style:italic;">Stand and Deliver</span> comes when the College Board refuses to believe that an entire class of Latino/a students could score at a high level on the test; and<br /><br />3) is often taken by students far less interested in learning the content than in having the AP label scattered generously over their high-school transcripts.<br /><br />The Independent Curriculum Group exists as a resource for all educators and all schools interested in returning to a world in which their own teachers and their own departments are free to design and deliver (standing or sitting) high-standards, high-level courses. Gone from this model is the fear of a class's poor performance, which might reflect badly on the teacher and the school and which is a major motivation for limiting AD class enrollment. Instead, schools are free to believe in the potential of all students to succeed and to allow students to take on any challenge they feel up to. As the ICG website states, "Students [in schools where the AP program does not reign supreme] retain more knowledge, probe more deeply, and have more motivation when learning is not subordinated to test preparation. Students who graduate from ICG schools attend the nation’s best colleges, and some of them take AP exams. But each school’s curriculum reflects the passions of its faculty and students." And, it should be added, the curriculum can reflect the school's mission and values, something hard to do when an external body in New Jersey is certifying what are perceived as your "best" courses.<br /><br />Time will tell what influence the Independent Curriculum Group has on education as a whole, but as a step forward toward a set off principles that we New Progressives stand for, it's a pretty good thing. <br /><br />As a post-script, it is exciting to me that not all the member schools of the ICG would necessarily spring to mind if you used the word "progressive." To me this indicates what I have been trying to get at all along in this blog: that New Progressivist ideas aren't about progressive-versus-traditional but rather an evolutionary stage to which many schools are arriving largely because the ideas are common-sense, proven, extremely compelling, and ultimately good not only for kids but for the kinds of adults these kids will become because of the education they are experiencing.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-18552313080773281062009-01-13T10:04:00.004-05:002009-01-13T10:16:41.470-05:00Progressive Education--what is it?Another short post:<br /><br />For those interested in wading into the morass of definitions, you can go to the <a href="http://progressiveschools.wikispaces.com">Progressive Schools wiki</a> and participate in the challenge of trying to define progressive education on the <a href="http://progressiveschools.wikispaces.com/PROGRESSIVE+EDUCATION--Toward+a+Working+Definition">PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: Toward a Working Definition page</a>.<br /><br />Maybe this is an impossible task, or even a fool's errand, but I am exceedingly tired of running into characterizations of progressive education, old and New, that are based on paranoid or utopian fantasy, flimsy evidence, or what can only be deliberate misreadings of either seminal documents or actual practice. <br /><br />I'd love to see what the Best Minds of My Generation can do to come up with a working definition to which actual porgressive educators can subscribe.<br /><br />Again, nothing to "Read on" about. C'est tout.Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-37155679584508430942009-01-10T11:31:00.004-05:002009-01-10T11:41:25.185-05:00The Progressive Schools wikiPeople keep asking me for the official list of progressive schools, but of course there isn't one. I thought I'd draw on the expertise of readers here to help compile not only a list of schools but some resources on New Progressivism as well as on progressive education in general.<br /><br />The result is the <a href="http://progressiveschools.wikispaces.com/">Progressive Schools wiki</a>. It's open, public, and ready for any schools, ideas, resources, and questions anyone might have. I have modestly populated a few pages, but there is much, much more to say.<br /><br />Please feel free to explore and contribute. Like any wiki, the Progressive Schools wiki is only as good as its contributors make it.<br /><br />And by the way, Happy 2009!<br /><br />(It says "Read more" below, but that's all there is for today. Check out <a href="http://progressiveschools.wikispaces.com/">the wiki</a>!)Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-5539281626839684702008-12-27T15:04:00.008-05:002008-12-27T19:57:58.341-05:00A tale of the New Progressivism (dedicated to Harry M.A. Hart, wherever he may be)My "progressive education" Google Alert continues daily to dredge up bits and pieces of vituperation aimed at various individuals' odd notions of what progressive education is and why it is to be blamed for the end of civilization as we know it. (I've also noticed that some of the nuttier blogs are actually cloned and published wholesale under different authors' names, a practice that seems to me at odds with moralistic indignation; but then, I voted for Obama, apparently a sign of the feebleness of my own moral fiber. I recently read a piece that seemed, in a masterpiece of ahistorical thinking, to conflate the ideas of the president-elect with those of Horace Mann [1796-1859] "and the Harvard Unitarians" as being responsible for the putative evils of the self-esteem movement.)<br /><br />But I'm not here to talk politics but rather to take the coming rollover of the calendar as an excuse to tell the tale of my conversion to the New Progressivism.<br /><br />You'd have to look fairly hard to find anyone with better Traditional credentials than mine. My grandfather and father both taught Latin, English, and History in an age and in schools where they didn't talk about Roman families, contemporary literature, or the history of places that hadn't been part of either the Roman or British empires. In the boarding school where they both spent the bulk of their careers, the key word was "structure," and it was a rare hot evening that was truly hot enough for the proctors of the evening study hall--as teachers, they were called "masters"--to permit the boys to remove their suit jackets. There were plenty of good times and good fun, but education was Old School; Thomas Arnold would have recognized it all, right into the early 1990s, when my father retired.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />I learned about teaching and school from these men in this place, even before I entered elementary school. Even in that nice pink brick 1950s edifice, the teaching was traditional. My first and second-grade teacher had taught my father, and most of my teachers had lived through the Depression. We diagrammed sentences and learned long-division the old-fashioned way, whatever that was, and when in seventh-grade I was ready for the selective independent day school my father had chosen for me, I was more or less ready.<br /><br />The next six years of all-male schooling included more diagramming, more "Sir"-ing the masters, study halls in rows of desks bolted to the floor, and a series of gimlet-eyed old fellows (okay, there was a notably brilliant woman who was invited to teach our tenth-grade English class as an "experiment") who had us toe-ing the line in all respects as they prepared us for our destinies in all-male, Ivy League universities. In time, this would come to pass.<br /><br />After college and graduate school, I began my teaching career at my father's school, but left shortly and completed my apprenticeship and began my journeyman years at two more all-male, pretty traditional New England schools. It was only a rash move born of personal desperation (I had just earned my "Ask Me About My Boarding School Divorce" t-shirt) that brought me to the progressive school I now inhabit, but even then my traditional leanings and experience served me well; in the post-Permissive early 80's, a teacher with Old Timey chops meant one less headache for administrators.<br /><br />And so the 1980s rolled to a close, and I was a fairly experienced teacher of history and occasionally English. My textbooks were my curriculum and vice versa, and I had somewhere encountered Bloom's Taxonomy and so was able to construct some pretty clever and intentional assignments and tests. I was surely set to carry on into my Sunset Years, a Mr. Chips-to-be generally liked by students and congenial with colleagues and (generally) to bosses. I was happy; the rhythm of the years was regular, and I could only agree with an older colleague who observed, "It's always the same script; just the cast of characters changes."<br /><br />I look at that period as something of Golden Age, but it would proved brass quite soon, I think. Fortunately, an older colleague--a man I didn't know well but who for some reason picked me--handed me in 1992 a cassette tape of Grant Wiggins presenting his landmark "<a href="http://i3title2d.wikispaces.com/file/view/GWiggins_1989.pdf">The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance</a>" at the NAIS Annual Conference, probably in 1991. The man who gave me this treasure is the dedicatee of this piece.<br /><br />One day as I was driving in the northeast part of our state I stuck the cassette in the deck, and for the first and only time in my life I had a "Paul on the road to Damascus" experience. After a few minutes, I had to pull off the road so that I could concentrate on what I was hearing.<br /><br />From the dashboard of my car I heard Wiggins's voice telling me that everything I thought about "curriculum" and grading, and the purposes of education was, if not wrong, hopelessly off the mark, but that there were new and better ways of thinking about all of it. "Planning backwards," "rubrics," "authentic assessment"--these terms, as Wiggins defined them in swift, broad strokes, were the essence of a new mantra that could change my entire approach to teaching. It wasn't about content, it was about <span style="font-style:italic;">understanding</span>, and students could be engaged in the process not because clever teachers could entertain them into learning but because thoughtful, intentional teachers could pose questions and create learning experiences that would naturally lead students toward knowledge. There were even "habits of mind" that could be defined and used as goals for learning.<br /><br />I became a Wiggins junkie, and soon enough I heard about Project Zero and a whole host of other educational think-tanks and individual thinkers who were thinking about teaching and learning in new ways. I was lucky enough to be working in a school that was suddenly open, with a change of leadership, to these ideas. In time I was a department chair and the head of a curriculum committee that was given carte blanche (more or less) to look for great new ideas about education that could be incorporated into our work with the simply stated goal of "reaching every student." I served for seven years as academic dean, charged with building up a body of practice and a school culture that was based on the ideas I came to call The New Progressivism. My career has been the better for it, certainly, but most importantly, so has my teaching and all my work with students.<br /><br />We've fought hard at our school to remind parents, students, and even sometimes ourselves that New Progressivism is about challenging work, deep understanding, and high standards, and we don't jump at every new idea that comes down the pike. Our teachers are expert curriculum designers who understand student-centered education, but they are also hard-nosed practitioners and promoters of their own disciplines. If our students have high self-esteem, it is because they earn it by hard work and authentic achievement.<br /><br />The New Progressivism is not about fluff, or relativism, or feeling good and knowing nothing. It is about giving students the tools to think hard and critically about the work they do and the world they inhabit, and it is about demanding that they develop a set of intellectual values--habits of mind, or intellectual character--based on the active, critical application of intelligence and keen values-driven moral judgment.<br /><br />So, that's my journey from traditional to New Progressivist education. <br /><br />If an older guy feeling a bit reflective can be indulged for another sentence or two, I'd like to suggest that if my forebears had the benefit of the insights of Wiggins and the other apostles of the New Progressivism, perhaps they would have embraced them as joyfully as I did. At heart, you see, my grandfather, father, and I have all been pretty dedicated to doing the best we can to help our students do the best <span style="font-style:italic;">they</span> can. The aims of the two approaches, at their best, aren't really so different.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-75017700494486103092008-12-13T13:56:00.006-05:002008-12-13T14:39:19.041-05:00Origins of The New ProgressivismThat we are in the era of The New Progressivism occurred to me a few years back, when I whipped up the following presentation to kick off a professional development event. (It's clear that I could perhaps have used one of those Edward Tufte seminars on PowerPoint design, but that's another story.)<br /><div style="width:425px;text-align:left" id="__ss_838049"><a style="font:14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;display:block;margin:12px 0 3px 0;text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/pgow3/the-progressive-education-tradition-presentation?type=powerpoint" title="The Progressive Education Tradition">The Progressive Education Tradition</a><object style="margin:0px" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=the-progressive-educational-tradition-1228992886546350-1&stripped_title=the-progressive-education-tradition-presentation" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed src="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=the-progressive-educational-tradition-1228992886546350-1&stripped_title=the-progressive-education-tradition-presentation" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div style="font-size:11px;font-family:tahoma,arial;height:26px;padding-top:2px;">View SlideShare <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/pgow3/the-progressive-education-tradition-presentation?type=powerpoint" title="View The Progressive Education Tradition on SlideShare">presentation</a> or <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/upload?type=powerpoint">Upload</a> your own. (tags: <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://slideshare.net/tag/progressive-schools">progressive.schools</a> <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://slideshare.net/tag/john-dewey">john.dewey</a>)</div></div><br /><br />The point here is pretty clear, I hope: that New Progressives draw on their forebears for a number of basic values and ideas, but that a mindless devotion to the dicta and practices of Dewey et al. is not what we're all about.<br /><br />For example, a good part of the focus of the New Progressivism is on curriculum and assessment, <span class="fullpost">with standards playing a large role in this work. While the Old Progressives would applaud this, I think it's safe to say that their understanding of asssessment, in particular, was rudimentary in comparison to the work that both theorists and classroom educators have been doing in this area for a decade or more. Very early educational progressives were also much more interested in the idea of differentiation as a social tool--to enable educational stratification that would support a more intentional separation of students based on vocational potential (for lack of a better term)--than as a pedagogical tool to help all students succeed at a high level; exceptions to this notion did exist, of course. <br /><br />Anyhow, this show marks the first appearance in my work of New Progressivism as a concept; it was three years later that what I saw as the pervasively New Progressivist content of the <a href="http://www.nais.org">National Association of Independent Schools</a> Annual Conference inspired my <span style="font-style:italic;">Education Week</span> essay.<br /><br />The "Third Culture" idea was an attempt to put a name on the idealistic expectations we have for the comportment and belief structures of our students--that in school, and we hope because of school, students will aspire to a more intellectually engaged approach to the world at large and a more socially and ethically circumspect approach to novelty and difference. This set of behaviors represents a "third culture" after the First Culture of the dominant popular culture (think <span style="font-style:italic;">South Park</span>, perhaps) and the Second Culture of their own household and family heritage. The idea needed more work then and still does, but it is an attempt to come up with a shorthand way of discussing the values proposition (!) that progressive education seems to be espousing in the 21st century.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-14252392012912216212008-12-09T18:20:00.004-05:002008-12-09T18:28:40.481-05:00The Progressive School Challenge, Take IIA week or so ago I posted under the title "Is your school progressive?" a kind of Progressive School Challenge, seeking examples of truly progressive practices of the sort that might aggregate to a functional definition of The New Progressivism. So far: a response from a single school.<br /><br />I repeat the challenge here so that any school or school person interested in submitting--just use the "Comment" form below.<br /><br />"Let's look at the question, "Is your school progressive?" Here is my challenge to readers:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">List three (3) pervasive practices at your school that you would deem progressive; these cannot be practices that exist in only a few classrooms or program areas. Justify your list, citing specific philosophical progressives sources and or practical progressive inspiration. You may also submit documentary evidence (or links to it) such as the school's mission statement, published values, and standards for effective teaching.</span><br /><br />I also am of the opinion that effective progressive education doesn't happen by accident. And of course my proposed certification process violates the most excellent Coalition [of Essential Schools] Principle of school being a place of unanxious expectations.<br /><br />I am looking forward to building a list of self-nominated progressive schools and to some great discussion of the nature of progressive practice."<br /><br />For those interested in reading the full post in which the challenge was presented, <a href="http://newprogressivism.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-your-school-progressive.html">here is the link</a>.Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-53027239851688942352008-12-02T12:59:00.004-05:002008-12-02T13:08:03.160-05:00TEXT: "The New Progressivism is Here"Since the available links to the article that started it all (see sidebar) all seem to require subscriptions or memberships, here is the article in its entirety, as published in <span style="font-style:italic;">Education Week</span> On-line as "Commentary," April 29, 2008:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The New Progressivism Is Here</span><br /><br />In February, I joined nearly 7,000 other educators at a revolutionary gathering in New York City. Probably few in attendance would have characterized the meeting as such, but the discourse, from main themes to individual workshops, was radically different from most mainstream American conversations about education. It promoted educational ideals that combined conventional practice with innovation from the leading edge of educational theory.<br /><br />Yes, this year’s annual meeting of the National Association of Independent Schools —an organization many readers may envision as a bastion of elitism and hidebound pedagogy—felt like a countercultural force.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />Ever since President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education proclaimed the country A Nation at Risk, 25 years ago this month, the United States has been in the grip of educational forces that are equal parts zealotry and hypocrisy. The zealots have decried “progressive” ideas as the root of all educational evil, from the “collapse” of standards to the enfeebling of character-formation by moral relativism and “multiculturalism.” The hypocrites, meanwhile, have determined that the education systems that produced them could never mass-produce “common” citizens. In compromise, the two sides both have embraced a test-driven, three-Rs-focused, teacher-loathing model of schooling, most succinctly represented by the doublespeak of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.<br /><br />Over the same period of time, educational thinkers and a host of individual teachers have developed a body of practice that, when properly executed, addresses the concerns of both zealots and hypocrites. These are approaches to teaching and learning that I call the New Progressivism. Untrammeled by state regulation and the need for instant political accountability, independent schools have become the test bed for the New Progressivism. If the NAIS conference was “about” any single thing, it was a quiet celebration of this New Progressivism.<br /><br />As represented in the practice of many independent schools, the New Progressivism has features that combine proven instructional techniques with efforts to prepare students for a globalized, diverse, and complex world. The essential characteristics are these:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Assessment against high standards.</span> Along with their strong emphasis on basic skills, these schools have always been known for high standards, which are hallmarks of the New Progressivist curriculum. Drawing on the ideas of scholars and experts such as Howard Gardner, Grant Wiggins, and Robert Sternberg, New Progressives design crafted, purposeful classroom experiences and assessments using those standards as benchmarks of excellence. Examples include “planning backwards,” varied assessment strategies, project- and problem-based learning, and envisioning textbooks and teachers as resources, rather than as the curriculum itself or general founts of all knowledge.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Professional development.</span> New Progressives believe in mission-driven professional development and a collaborative professional culture. Thoughtful induction and mentoring programs bring new teachers into communities of professional practice, while goals-based evaluation programs build teacher capacity. While it is true that independent schools’ overwhelmingly nonunionized teaching staffs may be more easily brought into line with institutional expectations, all schools can learn from their recruiting and training programs, which build committed faculties with a common set of skills, ideals, and approaches.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Real-world connections.</span> Using their own communities as resources, or having students explore the wider world through projects, research, or even travel, New Progressives are committed to having students build understandings beyond the boundaries of their own world. The independent-school dean Nadine Nelson, a diversity expert, speaks of the “all-terrain kid,” a student prepared to engage with new issues and challenges and quick to understand and accommodate to new situations and cultural norms.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Multiculturalism as a process, not a program.</span> New Progressives believe in creating communities whose members can connect, in every aspect of their education, across differences in race, culture, religion, ability, and way of being. “Multicultural” understandings and a commitment to human rights and social justice do not grow out of reactive or didactic teaching, but flow naturally through the curriculum and through all interactions within the learning community.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Character and creativity.</span> Like the Deweyite Progressives who spoke of “the whole child,” New Progressivism inspires and rewards personal integrity, empathy, hard work, optimism, collaboration, and access to the creative self, along with the ability to reflect on experience and analyze one’s own ways of learning and knowing. Character lessons associated with winning and losing—plus the virtues of competition, teamwork, supreme effort, and physical fitness—have long been part of the independent school tradition of mandatory athletics. Whether secular or faith-based, New Progressivist schools, rather than teaching moral relativism, help students discover and strengthen deep and abiding personal values.<br /><br />Likewise, progressives have always valued the aesthetic sense as well as the ability to think and feel originally and purposefully. In New Progressive schools, the arts are accorded respect, resources, and recognition of their value. Their students are also encouraged to exercise and develop creativity in other areas, from playing fields to research projects.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Civic engagement. </span>John Dewey believed that education must prepare students to become informed and effective participants in democratic society. New Progressives find ways for students to discover the power of individual agency through service, advocacy, and leadership. Most independent schools are explicitly values-based, and their students are expected to discover ways to put these values to work for the common good.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Technology as tool.</span> New Progressives have been both early adopters of emerging technologies and early skeptics about technology’s promise. They understand that technology is only a tool, albeit an often potent one, to enhance learning by freeing the mind for more interesting and worthy challenges.<br /><br />Each of the several thousand independent schools represented at the conference had its own mission, culture, and history, but in February we found ourselves united by a sense of a collective mission. Historically, our schools have considered themselves aspiring utopias, intentional communities with the highest academic and personal standards that are also highly desirable places to learn or teach. Although some have been cautious in embracing the New Progressivism (and many still shy away from the “P” word and its residue of ’60s-era associations), the buzz at the conference was all about what one participant described as “the message that business as usual isn’t going to be good enough any more.”<br /><br />With educators filling Radio City Musical Hall to hear messages of radical change from Sir Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink, and the conference program knee-deep in sessions focused on sustainability, service, global education, diversity, and emerging technologies, it was clear that the ideals of the New Progressivism have taken root.<br /><br />One does not have to believe that his or her students are “the leaders of tomorrow” to buy in to a philosophy of education that prepares them to enter higher education, the workforce, and civil society as innovative, flexible, and resourceful citizens and thinkers. Nor are independent schools the only places where such thinking prevails—many public schools and public school teachers are achieving extraordinary things with these same techniques. Together, these institutions’ successes should convince educational and political leaders to consider what the New Progressivism might mean for all schools, and all children.<br /><br /><br />© Peter Gow, 2008.<br /><br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-48457429140756157672008-12-01T18:49:00.005-05:002008-12-01T20:32:32.797-05:00Is your school progressive?I am asked quite often about progressive schools, and I nearly always disappoint them by failing to have a really good list at hand. I can always think of a few pretty radical places, a la <a href="http://www.sudval.org/">Sudbury Valley</a> (which my oldest child attended for some years), and then there are some pretty progressive chartered schools (I'm using the fussy term here in tribute to Clayton Christensen and the other authors of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation-Change/dp/0071592067">Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns</a>. Schools in the <a href="http://www.essentialschools.org/">Coalition of Essential Schools</a> (see below) tend to be progressive by nature. I happen to think there are a whole lot of schools that have some very progressive things going on--in curriculum, in diversity and social justice ed, in sustainability/green initiatives, in global education, in student services--and so I think a list could be pretty long.<br /><br />The other way to think about this question, I suppose, is to imagine a set of litmus test practices that would certify a school as progressive. I dare say most people interested in progressive principles could make up their own criteria.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />For example, I noted with both pride and some amusement a few years back when our school became a "national affiliate" of the Coalition of Essential Schools that, based on the Coalition's assessment of the lengthy profile I posted as part of our membership, that we were a "very high implementing" Coalition school. We did this without ever having consciously set out to be a Coalition school or to explicitly embrace Coalition practices; we knew about the CES, of course, and we'd read Sizer and other authors with CES connections, but we were already doing what many schools had had to change course to accomplish.<br /><br />In the end, what "progressive" means to me is what Christensen et al. call "student-centric" in all regards, but going beyond what I think they mean, because it feels as though most of what they have to say about school is really focusing on curriculum and instruction. The roots of New Progressivism, like the old, lie in the way the school thinks about and treats kids, and how the school acknowledges and manages difference, whether racial, cultural, spiritual, or philosophical. <br /><br />"Progressive" also has a great deal to do with the nature of the professional culture among the adults and how the school sustains and develops its teaching faculty in the service of its students. Do teachers share practice, talk about teaching, and use the opportunity of being with one another in a learning community to grow as educators?<br /><br />Progressive is about turning away from deficit models of student learning or character or behavior--about not being a KIPP school bent on correcting deficiencies in students' upbringing, I guess, but that's just one way of looking at what they do, I realize--and embracing the idea that there are ways to reach every student and that the job of teachers is to find those ways.<br /><br />Progressive is about the school enthusiastically embracing the idea that its job is not to create graduates who fit some ideal model of an independent school graduate but who are the very best versions of their individual selves that they can be--and that these students understand and embrace a set of optimistic and activist human values. These values are themselves progressive in a social or even political sense--they must be about peace, understanding, justice, and moving and sharing across boundaries.<br /><br />I don't think it's so bad to remind ourselves that the roots of progressive education lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of human nature: that the individual is born with powerful tendencies for goodness, curiosity, and generosity of spirit, and that progressive education allows these innate moral traits to flourish as it minimizes the constraints that breed selfishness and apathy. The other side, that individuals are by nature weak and self-centered and cruel and that education's task is to systematically suppress these characteristics by imposing external and arbitrary moral order, is clear enough in its manifestations.<br /><br />So here's a challenge to readers. Let's look at the question, "Is your school progressive?" Here is my challenge to readers:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">List three (3) pervasive practices at your school that you would deem progressive; these cannot be practices that exist in only a few classrooms or program areas. Justify your list, citing specific philosophical progressives sources and or practical progressive inspiration. You may also submit documentary evidence (or links to it) such as the school's mission statement, published values, and standards for effective teaching.</span><br /><br />I also am of the opinion that effective progressive education doesn't happen by accident. And of course my proposed certification process violates the most excellent Coalition Principle of school being a place of unanxious expectations.<br /><br />I am looking forward to building a list of self-nominated progressive schools and to some great discussion of the nature of progressive practice.<br /><br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-80520207514951227232008-11-23T17:34:00.004-05:002008-11-23T18:33:37.545-05:00Progressive architecture?I work in a building that was designed and built in the 1920s, in its day a model of progressive school architecture and still a pretty nice place to teach and learn. Deep in our archives lies a long essay by one of the early trustees (not the architect), a hands-on Boston Brahman of an engineer who wanted to make certain that the new country day school's classrooms received the maximum amount of sunlight each day. To this end, he had even built a model that could be rotated relative to the elevation and declination of the sun at various times of day throughout the school year. Sunlight was reckoned to be good for kids in lots of ways, not in the least because it was the best available source of vitamin D, which prevented rickets, the scourge of upper and lower class city children whose exposure to sunshine was limited by custom in the case of the wealthy and necessity in the case of the working poor. (Now most of us get our vitamin D from milk, to which it has been added since the 1940s.)<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />Kids at our school were unlikely ever to get rickets, as on a sunny day the light in our original building is clear, bright, and in warm weather even a little bit relentless. Along the way, the salubrious effects of good and plentiful light make for a pleasant learning environment. The classrooms are still adequate in size for classes today, and the hallways, dining room, and other areas serve their purposes remarkably well after eighty-some years. Just as the fine light makes reading and working more pleasant than it might be in a less well-planned structure, so do our flexible modular tables and chairs make it painless for teachers to shift from small group work to seminars to lectures with only a few moments' redeployment of the furniture. Add wireless internet and built-in projection devices, and teachers and students can generally focus on the work and not on getting set up to do the work. <br /><br />All in all, our school, like most older campuses, has been able to retrofit our spaces and classroom accoutrements to meet our needs. Most of this has been done incrementally, and we have adapted pretty happily. Our hallways, however, are often clogged with students doing small-group work outside their classrooms, and our meeting spaces are booked pretty solid. The elaborately designed 1960s science classrooms are still pretty good, but they could be better, and the multilevel library of the same vintage has both accessibility problems and, increasingly, functionality problems in a world moving from paper to electronic research. There are ways that we could imagine all of our spaces to be a bit more functional, a bit more friendly.<br /><br />But our systems all still work, and work well enough in their way, but the retrofitting is becoming a bit more of a challenge. As our founders did, we have recognized the need for some new conceptions, and so we have completed a master plan and are pondering the best way to bring the new concepts of space and work into being.<br /><br />The challenges of new technologies and new approaches to learning have us thinking hard about our lovely Georgian building, and they will pose the same issues for schools across the nation and the world. The rational, endlessly replicable rectangular classrooms filled with chairs and desks or tables have their place in the educational world, but new kinds of spaces are needed to serve 21st-century goals such as collaboration, new media literacy, digital communication, and even virtual or enhanced reality. <br /><br />Now, architecture and design do not equate to learning, but I think it's pretty much undeniable that student-friendly design and easy access to necessary classroom resources and technologies can facilitate learning by de-stressing the process for students and teachers alike. In the next town over from our school they are building a new high school that will cost around $200 million; I hope this will de-stress the people in the school, although the pricetag has sure as heck stressed the community's taxpayers. Arguments will persist over the cost, but the town will have a state-of-the-art school building that has been meticulously planned to meet every conceivable educational need for the next decades; one also hopes that the planners have left enough flexibility to accommodate the things of which they didn't conceive.<br /><br />This afternoon I came across a wonderful and provocative slideshow containing dozens of ideas about and examples of revised concepts of space in schools. Rather than present my own analysis and pontifications, I invite New Progressivism readers to have a look and then leave their own comments. There is some cool stuff here, and I think you will enjoy it:<br /><br /><div style="width:425px;text-align:left" id="__ss_44219"><a style="font:14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;display:block;margin:12px 0 3px 0;text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/esltechnology/school-design-be-the-change?type=powerpoint" title="School Design: Be the Change...">School Design: Be the Change...</a><object style="margin:0px" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=school-design-be-the-change-9492&stripped_title=school-design-be-the-change" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed src="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=school-design-be-the-change-9492&stripped_title=school-design-be-the-change" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div style="font-size:11px;font-family:tahoma,arial;height:26px;padding-top:2px;">View SlideShare <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/esltechnology/school-design-be-the-change?type=powerpoint" title="View School Design: Be the Change... on SlideShare">presentation</a> or <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/upload?type=powerpoint">Upload</a> your own. (tags: <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://slideshare.net/tag/school">school</a> <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://slideshare.net/tag/design">design</a>)</div></div><br /><br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6011483.post-27779700107011009212008-11-11T11:16:00.003-05:002008-11-11T11:19:46.133-05:00New assessments needed, now!The news seems to be everywhere these days: We need some new kinds of assessments that will truly measure students' capacities to do work that matters. Yesterday Education Sector published a report called "<a href='http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=716323'>Measuring Skills for the 21st Century</a>," and today researchers at UCal Berkeley have released <a href='http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/LSACREPORTfinal-12.pdf'>a report on the LSAT </a>, suggesting that while that test may predict One-L performance, it could better be replaced with a different kind of law school admission test that might actually predict the performance of future lawyers. For a while now schools and colleges have had plenty to chew on from psychologist Robert Sternberg whose research into intelligence and its measurement has generated a number of new approaches to secondary school and college admission that are in use at schools as traditional as Choate Rosemary Hall and Phillips (Andover) Academy. Tufts University, where Sternberg is now the dean of Arts and Scientists, has added a number of essay questions to its application process with the purpose of eliciting evidence of creative and practical intelligence and moral reasoning to supplement traditional academic performance data such as grades and SAT or ACT scores. <span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Why we need better assessments—let's even call them tests, at least in the context of both admission and the macro measurement of academic achievement—seems obvious enough.The workforce requirements of a new age, even with the economy as flat at the moment as Thomas Friedman's globalized world, are going to favor those who possess both precise content knowledge and a mastery of basic intellectual processes—reading, computation, scientific reasoning, technique in its many forms—as well as creativity, problem-solving skills, the ability to reason and communicate from multiple perspectives, and the ability to work collaboratively in multiple contexts and across cultural boundaries. The SAT, state assessments, and your average math or history examination measure at most a few of these capacities, often in narrow or even absent contexts. A few tests go a bit deeper—some IB and AP examinations, the ACT—but all are constrained by the challenges of both accurate norming and consistent scoring of any answers that aren't laid out as a row of bubbles.<br /><br />Classroom teachers have known this for decades, and the spread of new ideas about classroom assessment—projects, simulations, structured discussions, presentations, service-learning—is actually old news. But next schools and prospective colleges see evidence of this kind of assessment only second-hand, as it is embedded in letter grades or fleetingly described in letters of recommendation. What students are truly <em>learning</em>, even in New Progressivist schools, must usually be deduced or teased out of the data. Most schools haven't really figured out how to either measure or report deeper learning, especially in summative context.<br /><br />Better measures are out there. The Education Sector cites the <a href='http://www.cae.org/content/pro_collegework.htm'>College Work and Readiness Assessment</a> (CWRA), a handful of high quality, high standards simulations, and United Kingdom's Key Stage 3 Information Communications Technology Literacy Assessment, while the Aurora and Kaleidoscope batteries developed by Robert Sternberg's group are already in use. These tests at least approach the kind of holistic measurement of a range of capacities—including traditional content knowledge and skills—that will help schools continue to develop curriculum that meets the needs of a real world of work, civic engagement, and personal development.<br /><br />For independent schools espousing New Progressivist ideals, using traditional private school admissions tests like the Secondary School Admissions Test and the Educational Records Bureau's Independent School Entrance Exam, even supplemented by batteries of annual tests of academic progress, limits assessment to only some of the skills and knowledge we want our students to be able to develop as they enter and pass through our programs. Schools need to acknowledge the need to be looking for new kinds of minds that are open to and prepared for learning experiences that go beyond what "old-style" tests measure. <br /><br />The time seems right for many, many schools—not just the handful already using the CWRA or Kaleidosope—to actively seek out and incorporate the kinds of new assessments that measure a broad range of vital skills. Here again, independent schools have the gift of being able to freely try new ideas and to think proactively and deeply about the meaning and value of such assessments. <br /><br />In the twentieth century independent schools were disproportionately the pilots of "old-style" testing—the SAT, the Advanced Placement program. In an age where there were few mechanisms for identifying intellectual talent, these tests (born in part of the confidence that the early Progressives placed in psychometric testing as holding the key to human potential) served their purpose. But in a world gone mad with state assessments and where "test prep" and "teaching to the test" have become part of a college admission climate in which the term "gaming the system" is heard all too frequently, those tests and their ilk are headed the way of the dodo.<br /></p><p>Now it is time for a new generation of educational leaders to grab hold of what we already know about intelligence and about the needs of a changing society and find ways to apply the promise of psychometrics in whole news to a new era in educational assessment.<br /></span>Peter Gowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13602866242146968481noreply@blogger.com1