Lifelong Learners

Today’s kids live in a world that we couldn’t have dreamed of when we were children. The opportunities they have for learning are really incredible. Just think of all the changes that have occurred since we were in school.

When we wanted to look up information on a specific subject, we went to the library, searched through the card files, and then searched the stacks for the books that seemed most likely to be useful. Today’s kids simply turn on the home computer, tablet or smart phone.

To read for fun, we checked out our library books for a week or two. Today’s kids can instantly download whole books from Amazon, Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and more.

We waited for weeks for Scholastic Books order forms, and then orders, to come to our classroom. They download Kindle books and iPad apps in seconds.

We had books and magazines. They have e-books, video and interactive media.

For the first time in history, kids can pursue and develop their own interests at a very early age, and get access to a wealth of information almost instantly. For eager, engaged students, the Internet is better than any classroom we could have ever imagined.

Well, most of us could not have imagined it. But the popular twentieth-century science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, did predict much of it. More than 20 years ago, before there were home computers or an Internet, Asimov foresaw that someday computers would become ubiquitous and interconnected, and that this situation would improve learning possibilities for eager learners everywhere. And he concluded that:

“Once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers and reference material…. you can ask, and you can find out, and you can follow it up, and you can do it in your own home, at your own speed, in your own direction, in your own time.

“Nowadays, what people call learning is forced on you, and everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed – in class. And everyone is different. For some it goes too fast, for some too slow, for some in the wrong direction.” However, in the future, the student “can be the sole dictator of what he is going to learn, of what he is going to study… He’ll still be going to school for some things… but [he can also] look forward to the fun in life, which is following his own bent.”

“Through this machine, for the first time we’ll be able to have a one-to-one relationship between information source and information consumer…. “

In this future, “anyone, at any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. There is no reason then, if you enjoy learning, why you should to stop at a given age.”

Asimov’s future is here. The only question now is this: Will we take these amazing learning tools for granted, or will we take full advantage of them for lifelong learning, in the ways that Asimov predicted we would?

Asimov’s predictions for future learning, excerpted here from an interview with Bill Moyers more than 20 years ago, are in many ways remarkably accurate.

Today’s kids are floundering in many different aspects of their lives according to the Search Institute, an organization studying children’s developmental needs and support systems throughout the world.

After surveying more than three million children across 60+ countries, including a 2010 survey of 89,866 U.S. sixth-to-twelfth graders, the Search Institute reports that young people are not experiencing nearly enough of the 40 developmental assets they have identified as necessary for healthy development.

The Institute’s most recent report, A Fragile Foundation, contains the following:

“On the average, the 89,366 surveyed adolescents report experiencing only 20 of the 40 developmental assets. … More than one third (37 percent) report being involved in two or more of the ten dangerous patterns of high-risk behavior that we studied.”

The researchers further discovered that, regardless of gender, cultural background, town size, or geographical location, today’s young people typically:

• Receive too little support through sustained and positive intergenerational relationships;
• Lack opportunities for leadership and involvement;
• Disengage from youth-serving programs in the community;
• Experience inconsistent or unarticulated boundaries and expectations;
• Feel disconnected from and unvalued by their community, and
• Miss out on the formation of social competencies and positive values.

As long as these patterns continue, we will see too many young people who are susceptible to risky behaviors and negative pressure, drawn to undesirable sources of belonging (e.g., gangs), and ill-equipped to become the next generation of parents, workers, leaders, and citizens.

The great benefit of the Search Institute model is that it provides information on how the situations for children can be improved through specific kinds of support from families, peers, school, and community can foster developmental assets in children.

Following the line of reasoning outlined in the report, just a few of the many things that might help turn the tide include:

• Reducing children’s unstructured, unsupervised time home alone.
• Reducing TV overexposure (3+ hours per day).
• A caring school climate (experienced by only 35%).
• Positive family communications (experienced by only 32%).

The Search Institute does not directly measure poverty, although it acknowledges poverty as one of the most pervasive deficits in young people’s lives. There is extensive research to show that, statistically, poverty interferes with development, places children at greater risk of harmful behavior, and limits their options for the future.

As any parent knows, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to education. Even within the same family, children can be remarkably different. But that’s not the way the public school system sees it.

In general, the public school system is designed in such a way that all students must complete the same classes, in roughly the same order, to pass the same tests, leading through them through same rigid system of grades and graduations. There are two exceptions, two special cases in which differences are acknowledged: students who are identified as gifted, and students who are identified as learning-disabled. Only these students are allowed by the system to receive individualized attention to their unique learning profile — their strengths, challenges, interests, and goals. This myopic view of human differences would likely appall and astonish us if it weren’t for the fact that most of us have grown up within this system.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Hear Ted Robinson comment on student differences and how our education system could be different (below).

As parents, teachers, and caring adults, we want to see that children develop the attributes, skills, and habits that will foster lifelong learning. Sometimes this is easy. Some children seem to be made for school. But often children struggle in one way or another. Or, at some point in their schooling, things fall apart for them. Then what?

Current research provides some insight into the factors that help ensure academic success today as well as a more opportunity for enjoying the benefits of lifelong learning. Social scientists are telling us that, in order for our children to succeed in school, we need to provide them with certain kinds of support – not just for academic skill-building but for their healthy development as people.

Many years of research from various social science disciplines has found a strong relationship between specific healthy behaviors and academic success. The implication for educators is that the traditional narrow focus on cognitive development alone ignores other critical areas of youth development.

A body of social science literature now makes clear the fact that we can promote healthy development by meeting children’s needs for safety, love, belonging, respect, identity, power, challenge, mastery, and meaning. Schools can promote healthy development as well as successful learning by creating climates and teaching practices that honor and meet these developmental needs.

Parents, teachers, caregivers, grandparents, and other caring adults can all contribute important protective factors: caring relationships, high expectation messages, and opportunities for participation and contribution. These supports and opportunities have been linked to the development of resilience — broadly defined as the ability to rebound from adversity, and achieve healthy development and successful learning. The research consistently shows that the presence of such developmental supports provide a better indicator of whether a child will grow up to become a successful, well-adjusted adult than does the presence or absence of risk factors (i.e. poverty, drug-use, etc). To create lifelong learners, these supports and opportunities should be present in every part of a young person’s world: home, school, community, and peer groups.

The rallying cry of “education reform” is being sounded throughout the world. And major reform is beginning to take place — in small pockets and regions throughout the U.S. Listen to this clever animated presentation of Sir Ken Robinson describing some of the ways in which our system is broken, how we got here, and a few promising pointers for finding our way out.

Someone once said that the problem with today’s public schools is that they teach to the test instead of to the student. There’s plenty of truth in that. For our public schools, test scores are plummeting, and the stakes just keep getting higher. School funding depends on student test scores, and of course those funds trickle down into salaries. As a result, motivated administrators and teachers are focusing harder and harder on prepping their students for the annual standardized tests.

But test prep is not education. Learning to correctly answer multiple choice questions is a poor substitute for rich learning experiences that build curiosity and a passion for learning. If anything, our test-prep focused classrooms are stifling creativity, dumbing down curricula, and numbing both students and teachers alike.

Of course, there are a few schools, administrators, and teachers willing to buck these trends because they know that students need more – much more – than test prep. Call it child-led learning, differentiated instruction, or scaffolding; at the core, what these teachers are doing is re-engaging students. And that makes all the difference!

Sugatra Mitra is a man who is out to change the world — and he may just do it.

In 1999, Mitra and his research colleagues dug a hole in a bordering an urban India slum, installed an Internet-connected PC, and simply left it there, with a hidden camera filming. What his camera captured were kids from the slum playing with the computer, quickly learning how to use it, finding their way around online, and proceeding to teach each other. What was so amazing about this learning process is that it all happened without a teacher in sight.

From this and other experiments, Mitra concluded that education is “a system in which the structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system.”  He has concluded that teachers are not necessary for learning to happen, that “children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

Mitra has developed an approach that he calls “minimally invasive education.” His goal is to bring empowering child-driven educational opportunities to the children of the world, including the most remote and poverty-stricken communities – places where, by his own admission, “no good teachers will go.”

Intrigued? See Mitra’s now-famous Ted Talk below.

People often use the words “education” and “learning” to mean the same thing. But, of course, these two words are not synonymous. “Education” implies a teacher. In fact, it places emphasis on the process of one person (or system) in charge of the process of imparting knowledge and skills to another. For me, it conjures up an image of opening up a head, and pouring in new information. The learner is a passive participant. “Learning,” on the other hand, conjures up the images of activity: it is the learner himself (or herself) who is setting out on a quest for information, memorizing facts, or busily practicing a new skill.

This distinction is more important than ever. Our traditional public schools have increasingly made students passive participants in their own education. In fact, as Sir Ken Robinson frequently points out, our schools have been built around a factory model. One by one, students are put through the assembly-line-like process of successive grades. They are evaluated by standardized processes to determine how well they do, or do not, measure up to the criteria of product perfection and factory-generated sameness. This standardization has been carried to such ridiculous extremes that in some places, students in the same grade must be provided with the exact same information on the same day, throughout the school district, and throughout the state.

Compare this to a model of natural, student-led learning. The student develops an interest, and pursues it, taking his/her own inquires to their natural conclusions. Teachers may take the form of books, web sites, parents, peers, siblings, neighbors, and more. This natural learning process could hardly be more different than our current education system’s rigid structures of state-adopted curricula, tiers of administrators, and teacher-clerks. And I strongly believe that there are serious consequences to this.

Our traditional education system can create artificial barriers for the brightest, most eager students. These students want to be active learners. They want to follow the trails of new information and concepts. They often want to dig deeper into the subjects that interest them, but they are prevented from doing so. Instead, they must passively wait for direction from the teacher, school, district and state.

If we fail to attend to the interests, goals, challenges, desires, and unique development of each learner – especially our most eager and brightest, we will reap the consequences.

Consider how natural learning takes place. As the student’s body of knowledge grows, passion builds. And the more passion builds, the more rapidly the learning progresses. This is the way Einstein progressed. And Mozart. This is the way children learn before they enter school. It is, in fact, the path to the most fulfilling learning experiences for us all.

Do we really want to stamp out greatness? Self-direction? Personal fulfillment? No? Well, then, we may still have some time.

Questions we hear from parents who are considering homeschooling: Can this really work? Will my child still learn what s/he needs to learn? Is it possible for her/him to keep pace with students in traditional public schools?

We’re happy to be able to be able report that the answer to all of these questions is a resounding YES. Not only can your child keep up, but all things being equal, it’s very possible for your child to surpass the mastery levels of peers in traditional public school settings.

In one 1997 study of 5,402 homeschool students from 1,657 families, homeschoolers out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. Homeschoolers who were homeschooled two or more years scored substantially higher than students who were homeschooled one year or less. New homeschoolers scored, on average, in the 59th percentile while students who had been homeschooled the last two or more years scored, on average, between 86th and 92nd percentile.

Another study of 20,760 homeschooled students, conducted by Dr. Lawrence Rudner in 1998, found that students who had spent all their school years in homeschool had the highest achievement levels of all – especially in the upper grades.

Another important finding of the 1997 study was that there was no significant difference between minority and white homeschooled students. In grades K-12, both white and minority students scored, on the average, in the 87th percentile. Averages were higher, and disparities far less pronounced, among homeschoolers. In math, whites scored in the 82nd percentile while minorities scored in the 77th percentile. In the public schools, however, not only were scores much lower, but there was a sharp contrast. White public school eighth grade students nationally scored the 58th percentile in math while black eighth grade student math scores averaged at the 24th percentile and Hispanics at the 29th percentile.

What’s even more impressive is that these homeschooling results were produced with much smaller per-student spending. In the 1997 study, Dr. Brian Ray found the average cost per homeschool student is $546. This is only a fraction of the average cost per public school student, which was at that time, $5,325. Parents who spent over $600 per student had a positive effect on results: among these students, averages were even higher.

Put together the financial comparison and achievement comparison and the success of homeschooling becomes clear. Homeschooling students averaged in 85th percentile with budgets of $546 per student while public school students averaged in the 50th percentile with per-student spending of almost ten times as much.

Further studies are confirming. In 2009, these studies were repeated in greater detail with 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states, utilizing three well-known tests— the California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year. The results corroborated the findings of the 1997 and 1998 studies. In the new study, homeschooled students’ averages ranged from the 84th to 89th percentile across all subjects (in comparison to public school students’ scores of 50% across all subjects).
Household income had little impact on the scores of homeschooled students.

• $34,999 or less—85th percentile
• $35,000–$49,999—86th percentile
• $50,000–$69,999—86th percentile
• $70,000 or more—89th percentile

The education level of the parents made a noticeable difference, but the homeschooled children of non-college educated parents still scored in the 83rd percentile, which is well above the national average.

• Neither parent has a college degree—83rd percentile
• One parent has a college degree—86th percentile
• Both parents have a college degree—90th percentile
• Parental spending on home education made a little difference.
• Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
• Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentile
• These studies were rigorous, utilizing 15 independent testing services.

So, does homeschooling work? Study after study has demonstrated that it can, and does. We hope the information produced by these studies will be useful to parents considering homeschooling and/or independent learning charter school, an increasingly popular option that provides a way for students to learn at home while receiving funding and other benefits from the public school system.

For more information on homeschooling, take a look at http://www.homeschool.com, http://www.home-school.com and http://thehomeschoolmom.com. For more information on independent learning charter schools, see http://www.uscharterschools.org and http://www.ieminc.org.

Does the prospect of getting good (or poor) grades help our children succeed? Maybe not as much as we might think.

To better understand the effectiveness of rewards, Princeton professor Sam Glucksberg carried out a much-replicated research study called the Candle Problem. He gave his participants a problem (involving a candle, a match, and some thumb tacks in a match box) to solve, and asked them to solve the it as quickly as possible. To one group he said, “I’m going to time you in order to find out the average time it takes someone to solve this sort of problem.” To the second group, he offered rewards for rapid completion: $5 for the top 25% and for the fastest person, $20.

What affect do you think these incentives had on the participants in the second group? Do you think were a little faster? Maybe much faster? As it turns out, it took the second group — this group that was offered rewards for rapid problem solving — an average of three and a half minutes longer to solve the problem.

Surprised. Many scientists were too — and yet, it’s a strong study that has been reproduced many times with the same results. So, what’s going on here? Don’t incentives help people perform better? We assume that they do, don’t we? We hold out the rewards of higher paychecks for employee success, and the rewards of higher grades for student success. But, as psychology researchers have demonstrated in hundreds of studies like the Candle Problem over a period of 40 years, incentives do not always work.

Author Dan Pink explains, “You’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity. And it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. These contingent motivators… work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science. And also one of the most ignored.”

As it turns out, incentives only work for simple, rote tasks. They do not work for complex problems, the kinds of problems regularly faced by today’s employees and today’s students.

Learning about this line of research was eye-opening for me. It explains why my university students seem reduced to the same question after every lecture: “is this going to be on the test?” In fact, that’s often the only question they ask! I have often wondered why this is the case. But now, I can see just how natural this is. Since they were five years old, we led our students to believe that perfect products – from printing the alphabet to multiplication worksheets – was of utmost importance. Their perfection became their teacher’s and school’s validation via standardized test scores. And we made these grades absolutely critical to their future success. Why should we be surprised, then, when they turn around and fixate on grades? What question could possibly be more relevant for them than “is this going to be on the test?”

Students may be much better served by a system that is not focused on grades. Their everyday learning experiences would be transformed by removing artificial rewards, and rewarding them instead for tackling the harder problems and following their innate curiosity. Some schools are already moving in this direction, replacing grades with portfolios or products to demonstrate mastery.

Dan Pink offers this paradigm shift to the business world, which may just as well be applied to academia: “to my mind, a new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”  How might these three elements replace the focus on grades and reform education?