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.

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!

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?

Ted.com is one of the most exciting sites devoted to ideas capable of changing the world. And one of the most highly-rated of the 450+ talks on the site comes from Sir Ken Robinson, whose talk focuses on nurturing the individual talents of students.

Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children and champions a radical rethink of our school systems, focusing on cultivating creativity and acknowledging multiple types of intelligence. Robinson argues that our education system has created a hierarchy that fails to nurture the skills and talents of many of our most gifted students.

Robinson contends that students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” he says.

Robinson led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, was published in January 2009.

The time has never been better for adults who want to expand their horizons. For just about anything you’d want to study, you can get a good start by going online. There’s something out there for everyone. Really! Read on.

• Is travelling the world your idea of lifelong learning? Wouldn’t it be more fun if you could learn a bit of the language before you go? How about learning it at from home, for free?  Live Mocha provides a great new way to go about it. Instead of taking a pre-packaged language course, you join a language-learning community that spans 35 languages, 6 million people, and over 200 countries. Prefer another approach to language learning? Check out this article from ReadWriteWeb on “20+ Ways to Learn a Language Online.”

• Have you considered earning a degree through an online program, but not sure where to start? Take a look at the Online Education Database for a list of online programs. Search by degree level and subject.  Get rankings info. There’s even some financial aid help.

• Want to dive in to an academic subject on your own? Take a look at the Kahn Academy’s free online courses. UC Berkeley, Yale, MIT and other universities also make whole courses available online. Get more information from individual university web sites or at Open Culture , youtube EDU , or itunesU.

• History buffs: check out SmartHistory and Footnote, two beautiful, content-rich sites guaranteed to provide hours of educational enjoyment.

• Love great literature? If you haven’t discovered it already, you’ll want to check out Project Gutenberg , a great source for free e-book that you can download to your computer, smart phone, Kindle, or other e-reader. While you’re at it, take a look at Goodreads , a social media tool that gives you a way to share book recommendations with people you know.

• Looking for a creative outlet? How about learning to play the guitar? Get free online lessons at justinguitar.com , guitarmasterpro.net and guitarnoise.com. Or learn to draw at drawspace.com .

• Looking for a real, live teacher to guide you through the learning process? Check out TeachStreet,  an online directory for local classes, workshops, and special events – and the teachers and coaches behind them. Or, if you are looking for a teacher for free, check out Teachmate.org is a site where you may be able to find someone willing to trade teaching / learning experiences with you. Search locally or globally.

• Just wish you could learn faster and better? Take a look at this great article on how to do just that. While you’re at it, get access to the ultimate flashcard maker at Quizlet.   And get answers to one question at a time at WolframAlpha . And what if your computer, or the web, throws you a curve? Learn the basics you’ve somehow missed from the Tech Support Care Package at www.teachparentstech.org/.

Of course, we all know that actual learning doesn’t cost money. Time: maybe. Energy: definitely. But the sad fact is that conventional learning paths often also cost so much money that many of us just won’t avail ourselves of the offerings. And this creates artificial barriers to learning that are bad for both society and individuals.

Colleges are out of reach for many people. In many cities, private schools offer children better alternatives to public schools, but they are most often incredibly expensive. Even books cost, and DVDs and CDs can be pricey.

But all of that is beginning to change. It’s becoming more and more possible to find great educational alternatives that won’t break the bank. For young ones, independent study public charter schools are one great, growing alternative. Homeschooling is another. And web-based education is a third. For the rest of us, all kinds of new lifelong learning opportunities are opening up through the Internet.

Below is a list of my favorite free learning resources for all ages. Enjoy! (And if you know of other great resources, please comment to add to the list too!)

Teens / Adults

Have you always wanted to attend a top-notch university? How about for free? And while you’re wishing, how about making it so easy that you can attend from the comfort of your couch, while you’re in the car, or while you go for a jog? The University of California at Berkeley makes many of their regular course offerings available for free over the Internet. Log on at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php.

You can attend Yale lectures from your armchair as well. That’s right – Yale! Check it out at http://oyc.yale.edu/.

Open Culture is a great web site for free high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Not only do they offer online courses from 350 universities, they provide free movies, audio books, and other resources too.

The Free University of San Francisco aims to make the highest level of education available, completely free, to any individual who wants it, regardless of color, creed, age, gender, nationality, religion or immigration status—a university free of money, taught for free. The only requirement for membership is a desire to teach and/or a desire to learn. (Not web-based.)

TED Talks provide free educational experiences provided by the world’s most inspired thinkers — in the form of b18-minute talks. More than 700 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled, and can be freely shared and reposted.

WNYC Radiolab is a one-of-a-kind radio show, also archived as podcasts, that explores topics and issues that cross the lines between science, philosophy, and human experience. Topics titles are deceptively simple: Falling, Limits, Animal Minds, Cities, and more.

Academic Earth offers links to lectures from universities including Harvard, MIT, and Yale.

YouTube links to many different universities that offer educational videos. Find these at: http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400.

If you haven’t seen itunes U , check it out. You will first need to download itunes if you don’t already have it, but it’s well worth the extra step.

Backstory with the American History Guys provides a fun, quirky approach to history.

Grammar Girl makes an often-dry subject come to life. Webster’s Word of the Day [http://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/] provides an interesting (really!) look at one word each day. You can have it delivered to your email inbox too.

The Stuff You Should Know podcasts, from howstuffworks.com, answers people’s real-life questions on a wide variety of topics – from Vikings to sharks.

Triple-Emmy awarding This American Life , NPR’s Fresh Air , and Story Corps provide entertaining, educational stories from and about real people.

Kids

Cosmos 4 Kids provides educational information on the universe, galaxies, stars, systems, solar system, and space exploration.

Biology 4 Kids provides detailed, interesting information on cells, microorganisms, plants, invertebrates, vertebrates, and animal systems

Grammar Slammer provides  instruction and examples for practically every aspect  of grammar.

Check out these free weekly newsletter and “old time radio” adaptations of great books and historic stories chosen especially for homeschooling families.

This comprehensive mathematics website comes from Cynthia Lanius of Rice University and spans pre-k through 11th grade.

This site provides several student-friendly recipes that are accompanied by videos of students cooking the actual recipes and  explaining the process, step by step. This site specializes in practical money skills with lessons appropriate for every grade level. And here’s a site that offers free printable math worksheets organized by grade level, activity type, and theme.

The Educational Podcast Network offers podcasts on a wide range of subjects, geared for elementary, middle school, and high school.

Parent Driven Schools has long advocated for parents’ choice in the education of their children. After all, who is most motivated to make our educational systems the best they can possibly be? It’s not the educators, the administrators, or the politicians. It’s the parents!

Parents vote with their feet. They move their families to cities and neighborhoods where the schools are known to be good. They seek out charter schools that are a better for their child than the neighborhood schools. They home-school, too, in ever-increasing numbers.

Here at Parent Driven Schools, we are strong supporters of parent choice in the education of their children. We recognize that there’s no one right answer for all children, and we know from experience that parents are in the best position to make educational decisions. That’s why we want every family to be informed and empowered to make the best possible decisions. Following are a few tools and web sites that can help:

• Greatschools.org publishes annual School Chooser guides and distributes them at no cost to thousands of parents so they can make more informed choices about where to send their children to school.
• The US Department of Education provides a webcast called New Tools for Parents: Getting Informed & Getting Involved.  This webcast highlights the benefits of The No Child Left Behind Act, which provides parents with access to a greater range of educational options, including free tutoring programs, charter schools, and scholarships for low-income students. Another US Department of Education webcast, Charter Schools and School Choice, provides a more in-depth look at charter schools. The US Department of Education publicly states that “charter schools, in particular, have become increasingly appealing to parents, and for good reason—as laboratories for new educational strategies, these flexible schools improve education for everyone in the system and offer innovative places for children to achieve at their highest possible levels.”
• The homeschooling movement, while strong, is somewhat more diverse. Some resources for parents considering homeschooling include the Homeschooling section of About.com, Homeschool.com, and Classical Christian Homeschooling.
• Independent study charter schools are yet another option, offering benefits of both charter schools and homeschooling. For examples, see Innovative Education Management (IEM) Charter Schools, Sky Mountain Charter School  and Ocean Grove Charter School . IEM has been successfully developing and operating California charter schools for many years.
• Call our free HelpLine anytime during business hours. Our support specialists provide free information, ideas and resources for parents making educational decisions or experiencing difficulty working with their child’s school. The HelpLine phone number is (800) 893-6199.

Why is Individualizing Education So Important?

In today’s public schools, standardized tests are given annually. All of the children in the same grade are expected to perform well. To make sure they do, teachers are focusing more and more on teaching to those tests. The goal is to spend the most time possible focused on the topics that are addressed in these tests.

Increasingly, brain research is showing that this approach is misguided. Take, for example, the National Institutes of Health study published in Neuroimage in 2007. This study found that boys’ and girls’ brain structures develop in different sequences. Specifically, these researchers found that while areas of the brain involved in language mature about six years earlier in girls, areas involved in spatial memory mature about four years earlier in boys. Could this be why we hear teen-aged girls complain about math being so hard? And teen-aged boys complaining that poetry is girls’ stuff? It seems so.

However, we are not likely to see public schools separate students into classes by gender. But the more you look at the data, the more it really would make sense to do so. Then again, there are many more kinds of learning differences in any given classroom. For example, we have many  children who have been identified as having learning disabilities, and more who seem to be significantly challenged, although we’re not sure why. Even in the same child, we may find giftedness in regard to math and difficulty keeping up with reading, for example. We have children who do well as long as everything is presented in an auditory fashion, or with opportunity for hands-on exploration. Children who seem to need to move, and children who need quiet to think. The variety of unique needs to be met in each classroom is fairly astounding.

It’s a shame that our public schools are so bent on standardized testing. We can only imagine what heights our children might reach if, rather than teaching to the test, we pitched our lessons in the ways that are best suited each child’s unique profile of interests, strengths and challenges.