Not a Single Story

On education, technology, what I'm learning, and the occasional randomness.

[opebukola]

Maybe you cannot change the world but, for most of us teaching in classrooms,  there are ways of making changes in one's own class that can make a difference--to one's students, to one's own role in replicating inequity, and as a model to our institutions seeking to "transform higher education."

Cathy Davidson is an amazing educator and I’ve loved following her writings on higher ed. This great post describes the design process for a student-centered approach to higher ed. Methinks the same principles could apply in K12

[opebukola]

Up close, technology-assisted personalized learning doesn’t seem to reduce the need for great teachers; in fact, the most successful programs seem to rely on them. In the Bricolage Academy, a charter school in a middle-class neighborhood in New Orleans, first grade teacher Diana Turner uses technology to amplify what she does best: explain and reinforce complex mathematical concepts so that six-year-olds can grasp and retain it. She then provides the children with opportunities to use that knowledge in a variety of different ways. It looks like this. First, Turner gives her full class a high-energy lesson on how to add two digit numbers in their heads. “What does 54 plus 24 equal, Ce’ Leb?” she asks. Ce’ Leb knits his brow. She waits for the answer. “88,” he says finally. “Why do you think that?” she asks. While explaining how he broke the numbers down into tens and ones, he realizes his mistake and amends his answer. By her students’ facial expressions and body language, Turner can tell which kids are getting it (most) and which kids aren’t (four kids in particular seem a little foggy on the whole idea.) She puts the bulk of her class to work on a simple pencil-and-paper worksheet and quickly reteaches the concept to two of the laggards. After a few minutes, she reformulates her class again. A group of eight kids begin representing a list of two-digit numbers by counting beans into tens and ones cups, giving them a physical sense of place value. Five others grab chunky plastic covered iPads, don headphones, and listen to Turner via some homemade videos she posted to YouTube. In the videos, she is coaching her students to add two digit numbers on a dry erase board, photograph their results, and send it to her Google Docs account. With fourteen of her students learning with iPads and YouTube or Dixie Cups and dried beans, Turner is free to give a quick private lesson to two students who need it re-explained. Bricologe principal Josh Densen believes blended learning is great “because it allows us to enhance the teacher’s effect. But it only works so well because we have a great teacher who is running it.” Can technology-assisted personalized learning work with sub-standard teachers or teachers who work remotely and never meet their students at all? “I’ve seen schools try that,” said Densen, with a shrug. “It’s not something we think is viable.”

I really love this description of a teacher teaching with technology and 1-1 from Bright. It highlights the ways that tech can enable great teachers to quickly differentiate, and reformulate their classroom. In this example the teacher goes from whole group instruction, to small groups (some tech-assisted, some not) to individual instruction. 

[opebukola]

The First Law of Conversation states that talking about school innovation tends to cause feelings of awesomeness while the actual work of innovation can be soul-crushing

Alex Hernandez writing in Edsurge. I love reading his writings in EdSurge, and learning about schools that are really personalizing learning. It’s tough tough work. Read this, and pair it with this peek into Summit’s platform. 

[opebukola]

Me and three other volunteers have been teaching these amazing high school students to code all year through ScriptEd. They’ve been accepted to internships, and we’re looking for companies to host them for 6 weeks this summer. If your company is interested, check out https://scripted.org/give/opportunity/

Please share!

[opebukola]

So data itself is useless. But in the hands of skilled teachers and principals, the right data can translate into powerful changes for kids. ..... Many high-performing nations don’t test every year. They choose quality over quantity, administering better, more expensive assessments, but testing less frequently. These assessments go beyond basic “pick-the-right bubble” skills a monkey could do in order to measure the more complex abilities that tend to determine success in college, a career, and life. We are asking tests to do too many things: give useful information to parents; motivate students; evaluate teachers; rank schools, districts, and states; and on and on. In a thicket of tests that vary wildly in quality, it’s easy to forget the true purpose of school: providing an excellent education to every child who walks through the doors. Data can work toward that end, but only when assessments measure the right things, are used in a way that supports schools rather than punishing them, and are given in moderation so we don’t sacrifice too much instructional time. Policymakers can’t just ask, “Does this new test give us useful data?” They have to ask the harder question, “Does this new test give us data that justifies the cost, the logistical burden, and the lost instructional time it will impose?”

Justin Minkel writing in EdWeek 

[opebukola]

Goodreads once again helped me to track my reading in 2014. I didn't quite make my reading challenge of 35 books, but 29 is not terrible. Some observations for this year:

Lots of books about education.  Both Building A Better Teacher and The Smartest Kids In the World got a lot of press this year. I thought they were both well-written, but neither offered particularly new insights. Three relatively old books - Why Don't Students Like School, Shop Class as Soulcraft, and What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated  - were my favorite education reads of the year. Overall, I probably read too many books about education this year, and should challenge myself to use reading as a way to step out of the bubble

The ratio of non-fiction to fiction was terribly high. I will aim to read more fiction in 2015

Books I was told I would love but didn't: Bad Feminist, Men We Reaped...

Books I loved: Life of the Beloved became an instant spiritual classic. Brown Girl, Brownstones' Selina Boyce is now one of my favorite coming-of-age novel protagonist; she really is a black girl from the future

Here is my 2015 list. Onward with another year in books!

p.s. throwback post to my readings from 2013

[artsdotblack]

ARTS. BLACK began like many things in my life have begun - as an intellectual call and response. When my co-editor, Taylor Aldridge, asked on Facebook: “Where are all the young Black art critics?” It sparked a firestorm of responses. Isn’t there someone Black writing for that one art...

[opebukola]

So proud of our Zora editor Jessica Lynne for this! A new space for critical thought on black arts. 

[opebukola]

After more than two thousand interviews, the investigators concluded that forty-four schools had cheated and that a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.” They wrote that data had been “used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish.” Several teachers had been told that they had a choice: either make targets or be placed on a Performance Development Plan, which was often a precursor to termination. At one elementary school, during a faculty meeting, a principal forced a teacher whose students had tested poorly to crawl under the table.

New Yorker's informative and heart-breaking look at the cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools. 

[opebukola]

Job Opportunity

I know an amazing, fast-growing edtech nonprofit that's looking for a Program Manager in nyc. If you or someone you know is looking for work at the intersection of education and technology, let me know!

[opebukola]

the notion that some anonymous committee of grownups has made a list of stuff that all kids need to know because that's what jobs are going to [require] in the future is preposterous. The maker movement prepares kids to solve the problems that [adults] never anticipated.

Gary Stager, co-author of the book "Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom" speaking to EdWeek. Going to add this one to the #edu reading list

[opebukola]

The 33 Realest Tumblr Posts About Being A Person Of Color

Tumblr goes in, y'all.

So much truth in this post. Buzzfeed must have recently hired a bunch of PoC as I've noticed a marked increase in posts with stuff PoC like... :)

[opebukola]

I'm hosting a teaching a FREE web fundamentals class at Dev Bootcamp in NYC on 7/19 targeting black and Latina women. 

Black people are among the biggest users of digital technology (twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.) yet the engineering staff of many of these companies are virtually devoid of us. This is one small effort, among many, to make sure we are creators, not just consumers, of digital tech that we use, support, and fund. 

Register for the workshop here: http://webfundamentalsworkshop.splashthat.com/

[opebukola]

Great #edu reading list by Matt Candler. Top of the list is one of my favorites, James Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South. 

The Education of Blacks in the South. Anderson, James

The Ethics of Aristotle. Aristotle

The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America's Public Schools. Berliner, David C.

The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen, Clayton

Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford, Matthew

Seven Myths About Education. Christodoulou, Daisy

As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin. Cuban, Larry

Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cuban, Larry

Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. Delpit, Lisa

Democracy and Education. Dewey, John

The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois, W. E. B.

Mindset. Dweck, Carol

Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire, Paulo

Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner, Howard

Greenfield Schooling. Hess, Frederick

The Same Thing Over and Over. Hess, Frederick

The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. Hirsch, Jr. E. D.

The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them. Hirsch Jr., E.D.

An African Centered Response to Ruby Payne's Poverty Theory. Kunjufu, Dr. Jawanza

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Lukas, J. Anthony

The Republic. Plato

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch, Diane

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. Ripley, Amanda

The Way We Were?: The Myths and Realities of America's Student Achievement (Century Foundation/Twentieth Century Fund Report). Rothstein, Richard

Emile. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Program or Be Programmed. Rushkoff, Douglas

2 of Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Sizer, Theodore R.

Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Tyack, David

A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform: A report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States. US Department of Education.

Up from Slavery. Washington, Booker T

Race Matters. West, Cornel

The Aims of Education and Other Essays. Whitehead, Alfred North

Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Willingham, Daniel T.

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Icons of America). Zimmerman, Jonathan 

[opebukola]

You may be in Princeton, but it seems like we should probably put this in really simple kindergarten examples for you. In the simplest, crudest metaphor I can think of, let's say you're a fully abled person in a race against a man with only one leg. You train a long time, run really fast, and beat him. No one is saying you shouldn't be proud of working hard or running so fast; all we're really asking for is that you admit that maybe having two legs fucking helped a little bit. Using this metaphor, let's again break down some other arguments you can't really use. For instance, just because some one-legged people are faster than some two-legged people or manage to race doesn't mean that it is still not, on the whole, easier for two-legged people to walk and run. Again, privilege deals with macro level institutional and cultural ideas, not anecdata. If your grandfather only had one leg, but you had two, you don't get to claim that you do not have two-legged privilege. Having ancestors that endured hardships is important only if either you endure those same hardships or if those past hardships have continued on today in the form of discrimination based on your shared characteristics.

From To The Princeton Privileged Kid.

I've been avoiding reading too much about the Princeton Kid; it's lame that just because an Ivy Leaguer writes a dumb Op-ed, it gets way more attention than the dumb Op-eds being written all around college campuses. But I do really appreciate this response on Jezebel, and the way it breaks down what privilege means. 

[opebukola]

If you know a young boy of color in 10th or 11th grade interested in tech, encourage him to apply to this codinf & leadership 6-week summer program! http://www.allstarcode.org/

[opebukola]

when Colorado State University Global Campus gave students the chance to substitute passing a Udacity programming course and paying an $85 processing fee for the $1000 associated with taking (and passing) an equivalent residential class, zero students took them up on the offer. Similarly, by the end of 2013 not one student signed up to receive a transcript from the American Council on Education (ACE) that would allow them to use accredited MOOCs from Udacity and Coursera as potential substitutes for residential classes.

Finding the Right MOOC Market for College Kids

[zoramagazine]

March is for the womens…and so is this mix I did in collaboration with Zora Online Magazine. Had a great time putting this together. Make sure to check out Zora’s website and follow em on the twitter thing: Love ya’ll -P. Artwork By: @sansanzabeth Like, follow, or Instagram Run P. 1. Citizen Weekend Intro - Lupita Nyong’o 2. Samaritan - Nonamegypsy 3. How to Satisfy your Lover (Prod. J57) - Denitia & Sene 4. Cell - Falcons 5. Real Love (SHASH’U Remix) - Mary J. Blige 6. Shadow of The Beast - Perseus 7. Creep Astronomar Moombahton Remix - TLC 8. Trip.Fall - Denitia & Sene 9. Alicia - Darius & Crayon 10. Be Your Girl (Kaytranada Edition) - Teedra Moses 11. L.M.O. (Giant Step Mix) - Muhsinah 12. Locked in Closets - Solange Knowles 13. White Noise (Feat. Aluna George) - Disclosure 14. Don’t Wait (Kingdom Remix) - Mapei 15. That Thing (Gold Boy Bootleg) - Lauryn Hill 16. You Ain’t Got It (Funk That) - Nina Sky 17. Sunshine (Cristian Dinamarca Remix) - Rye Rye & M.I.A. 18. You Know You Like It (Wilfred Giroux Remix) - Aluna George 19. Jerk Ribs (Will Saul & Komon Remix) - Kelis 20. Homee (Old Money Remix) - Blind Benny 21. Tell Me (George FitzGerald Remix) - Groove Theory 22. Dignidad - Celia Cruz 23. Enemy (Prod. Nguzunguzu) - Kelela 24. Updowndownup (Prod. Machinedrum) - Janet Jackson 25. Break You Down (Feat. Sanna) - Loz Contreras 26. Sourire - Les Nubians 27. 5 (Feat. Jaden Smith) - Willow Smith 28. At Night - Ele 29. Actually No - Angela Davis 30. Boom Skit - M.I.A.

[opebukola]

Amazing!! So grateful to @Run_P for my soundtrack today and all week!