New entries

Here are the best of the new items in our site.

An Explosion of Pedagogical Agents

The charge to America's public education system has shifted from 'access' to 'achievement.' To meet this challenge education should be open to new professional entrants, open to new authorizers or sponsors of schools, open to new learning programs, and open to all students that wish to attend. This paper, written for Threshold magazine, argues the promise for teacher-lead and other innovative schools to better serve student needs.

The Other Half of the Strategy: Following Up on System Reform by Innovating with School and Schooling. (pdf)

System-level reforms like standards, accountability, choice and chartering make it more necessary and more possible for schools to succeed with learning. But these reforms do not by themselves effect achievement. Kids learn from what they read, see, hear and do. So success in the effort at improvement requires capitalizing now on the system-level changes with a major effort to create new forms of school and schooling. Those who prefer conventional school should be able to stay with conventional school. But the traditional must not suppress the innovative. The strategy beyond NCLB should be such a 'split screen' strategy, transforming K-12 gradually as new models gradually replace the old models of school.

Innovations in Schools and School/ing: Minnesota's charter law is providing significant innovations through both new schools and school/ing. (pdf)

State chartering programs are hailed as providing a space for innovation in public education. However, research and reporting on chartered schools has tended to focus on test scores and the demographics of enrolled students, and not on the innovations taking place. This report briefly outlines some of the innovative approaches in Minnesota charter schools to both the structure of "school" as an institution, and the "schooling" that takes place inside of school.

Rethinking the Student-Centered Classroom: Personalization and the Type II Application of Technology

Modern technologies, if applied properly, can personalize the process of learning for students without significantly increasing labor costs of the adult worker, the teacher. Before this can happen educators must understand there are distinct ways that technologies can be applied pedagogically, therefore maximizing its potential. The classifications of Type I and Type II, developed by Cleborne Maddux and LaMont Johnson, help in this regard.
Type I applications use technology to make traditional teaching methods easier or more efficient, while those uses that are classified as Type II make possible teaching and learning in new and fundamentally different ways. This article defines the professors' conceptual work, provides context, and applies it to the pedagogical goal of bringing learning to the level of each student: what we commonly call personalization.

Mike Smith's plea to hold off reauthorizing NCLB

In this 'op ed' written in the spring of 2007 Marshall (Mike) Smith argues it is too early for Congress to proceed with reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind program. Smith, a senior official in the Clinton administration's U.S. Department of Education, was a key author of the strategy of systemic reform.

A Learning Revolution

This remarkable vision of schooling and learning rebuilt around the potential of digital electronics comes from the person in charge of education for the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. In 1990 Mike Smith wrote the initial, defining paper on standards-based systemic reform. This was a talk to the Asia Society in Beijing.

Staying In!! Youth on the path to quitting school explain why motivation is central to learning and graduating. (pdf)

"Staying In!!" examines the experiences of some youths who quit school, were attending a school with a low graduation rate, or were on the path to quitting. It describes their human, and democratic, desire to choose whether or not they will learn. Once engaged, they do learn better. It finds that different things motivate different students to choose learning; that no one factor is likely to motivate all students to learn well. It’s possible that states now doing best with motivation are those allowing for the creation of new and fundamentally different schools, advancing customization in addition to high standards for learning.