Inequities in educational settings

“What are the inequities in your educational setting?”  This is a very hard question for me to answer because the existence of my educational setting is inequitable.  I am sure that my colleagues are tired of hearing and reading about this from me.  The number of alternative schools, and enrollment in alternative schools is increasing, due in large part to excessive use of zero tolerance policies.  Students of color, those with low socioeconomic status, or those with disabilities are disproportionately disciplined and disenfranchised.  Many of these students end up in alternative schools.  In my “educational setting” a quick look a the demographics verifies that this is true for north San Diego county.

Tonight I was really touched by the two young men from the Digital Connectors Program.  I spend a couple evenings a year conducting workshops for our parents on internet safety.  Jeff and I have taught basic computer skill workshops for our parents on the occasional Sunday.  I now know we’ve been doing this all wrong.  We should be selecting and training a few motivated students who could then teach not only our parents but others in the community as well.

In fact my student voice research and this evenings session has me returning to a couple of questions tonight.  Fullan asked in 1991 , “What would happen if we treated the student as someone whose opinion matters?” I would like to extend that sediment and ask “What would happen if students were responsible for educating themselves and other students and we were just facilitators?” 

PLN update First Twitter Mention

Hey @jheil65 do I get points for my first twitter mention from someone I don't know?
So I have to admit it is kinda cool

Futurist Senario

I would like to implement a blended environment composed of online mastery based classes where students would receive credit based on demonstration of mastery.  The courses would be web-based and administered as independent study / credit recovery for attendance purposes.  It would be conducted in a one room computer lab with 25 computers manned by a minimum of one teaching assistant and one teacher at all times of operation.  It would operate from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm and have three teams of teacher-teaching assistant pairs that operated it in three 4 hour shifts.  Each Teacher would be responsible for administration of a maximum of 40 students.  Therefore, the capacity of this lab would be 120 students.  Students would attend the at assigned times ranging from 1 two hour session a week to daily two hour sessions depending on their progress.  Students and their parents would also be able to check out netbooks so that they could work at home.

1.  If you were to implement this practice, strategy, idea today, what specialized skills, resources, and dispositions would you need to obtain for yourself, your colleagues and staff?

If implemented today at JCCS this would have to be an autonomous unit established as a pilot in one region.  Technology resources (student computers and curriculum) would have to be acquired.  I believe a few JCCS teachers could be found with the necessary skill set.  If not then, some technical training of the selected teacher-teaching assistant teams might be necessary in addition to training on the curriculum.  The biggest hurdle would be the established attendance reporting system,  JCCS leadership mindset about attendance reporting and by far the teachers union.  This arrangement would require some exceptions or flexibility to current teacher contract.  The union leadership is intently interested in maintaining the existing Independent Study system, which is woefully out dated and inadequate, because of the freedom and flexibility it provides the teachers.

2.  What skills will your colleagues and those you supervise need in order to be successful in this scenario? Of those skills, which ones are currently being supported through resources such as professional development in your setting? Which ones are missing or minimal? What is currently being supported in your setting that would likely be obsolete in 2020.

JCCS is currently encouraging and supporting teachers obtaining the technical skills necessary to teach in this environment.  As eluded to in the answer to question #1 our current way of conducting Independent Study is currently outdated.  It does not serve our students well.  They need the scheduling flexibility but the instructional pedagogy is less than inadequate and it is a totally paper based system.  I believe if Independent Study continues to be offered the way it is today it will not exist in our organization in 2020.  In fact the Community School part of our system may cease to exist.

In what ways are we unprepared, lacking in resources and staffing, or to what degree are our strategies and underlying values unable to respond effectively to the conditions this scenario represents?

JCCS educational offerings outside of the institutions are to a large degree determined by what the teachers union will approve.  As with most teachers unions they are run by long time teachers committed to a seniority system, and intent in maximizing their retirement payments.  In California, these payments are determined to some degree on the earnings a teacher has in their last 3 years.

3.  What could we be doing now to leverage this trend to our advantage?

I think this a baby step toward JCCS leveraging the online instruction trend to its advantage or survival.

4.  What would need to happen internally and in the external environment for preparing yourself and those you lead to navigate in this strategic vision? What changes should your organization begin to make? What should it start doing? What should it stop doing?

Internally JCCS needs to become aware of the research surrounding effective instruction.  What students want in their educational environment and what’s working in other alternative schools in San Diego County.  A select group of people are doing some of this but it is not disseminated.  JCCS very rarely brings teachers and administrators in from outside the organization.  It needs to build a model for the future free of what is being done now and what has always been done.  According to Christensen this may require a new autonomous unit that creates a new school – perhaps a charter school.

Proposal Defense

For anyone who is interested my Dissertation Proposal Defense it can be viewed at the following link

http://prawn.csusm.edu/Mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=010aa3157baa45f08c18a89836f017001d

Reccomendation from Project Tomorrow

 It is time we built an online school that could reach into every institution, every community classroom and replace textbooks and worksheets for Independent study.  If we do not address the demand gap for online learning someone else will.  It is not for every student, and it is not all or nothing.  It is a way to address our free agent learners.  Providing them “Learning that is enabled, engaged and empowered.” Learners can be in charge of their own learning, taking the time and effort to master the content in a way that they find meaning and propose

Take a look at the following presentations that present both the demand for online learning and the ROI  for implementing an online learning program.

The Demand Gap for Online Learning: Latest Trends from the Speak Up Research

Online Learning ROI: Building the case for your online learning program 

JCCS and Disruptive Innovation

Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Innovation essentially states that institutions (companies, organizations) will tend to innovate to serve current customer perceived current or future needs.  A disruptive innovation enters the picture by serving a population that is not currently served.  As that product continues to innovate it increases its functionality while maintaining the advantage that allowed it to serve the unserved eventually pulling in customers served by other institutions.

Horn, Christensen’s coauthor in “Disrupting Class”, predicts that online learning could be a disruptive innovation for education initially serving students who are not currently served.  Among the students he lists as potential entry points are students who are not served well currently.  His list includes drop outs, incarcerated students, students behind in credits (credit recovery), and expelled students.  These are the students JCCS serves.  If he is right we should be getting out in front of this disruption.

Horn also mentions that when an existing institution wants to embrace a disrupting technology it needs to create an autonomous organization because the disruption, by definition, requires a different perspective often in conflict with the current culture of the existing organization.

As JCCS struggles to bring online instruction on board there are countless examples of this.  I feel that unless JCCS spins off a separate online "school" it will meet the fate of DEC.  Someone else will enter into what JCCS has always assumed was a protected market and before JCCS can adapt it will become irrelavant.

Visitor or Resident?

For me this is not a simple question.  Before I can tackle Visitors and Residents I need to tackle Immigrants and Natives.  The later article which I have been handed no less than 15 times [Prensky M., (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Iss: 5, pp.1 – 6] is a faulty distinction.

However, even though as White  indicates, to equate Digital Immigrants as old and Digital Natives as younger is a flawed, there is some truth to it.  By definition I, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, have to be classified as Digital Immigrants.  We were born before the technology, before the Internet, before the microprocessor, before the Hewlett-Packard calculator.  It makes no difference that I was programming (and getting paid for it) at the age of 12 and Gates and Jobs would mold and bring the technology to the world.  We were not born “into the technology”.  We, well that’s really presumptuous, they would help give birth to the technology.  We were/are not characteristic of what is meant when people refer to Digital Immigrants. We did not migrate as adults.  We are more like infants brought to this world by our parents. As such, we had no discernible accent so could sometimes pass for natives but in the truest sense were not.  In many ways we were digital parents.

So it is true for my classification as a visitor or a resident.    From the picture painted in the video I would have to be classified as a visitor.  However, I am really a damaged resident.  The only metaphor I can conjure up is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  I, in no way, mean to be little, or equate my issues to, what many of our incredibly dedicated arm services personnel suffer.  It is simply the only metaphor I have come up with to describe my situation.  I lived in this world when it was a wild frontier.  We didn’t reside in an established place.  We lived off the land as we explored, fought over, mapped and built places.  My personal journey, as I told my cohort in our first quarter together, is not one I am comfortable elaborating on.  Somewhere along the way I sideswiped an IUD and have never been able to fully integrate back into the digital society.  It is not because I am unable to master the technology or am afraid of identity theft.  Anyone who knows me knows it is not because I lack opinions, informed or otherwise, or am reticent to share them.  Something broke or became disconnected. 

For me, the Web is not a tool box although it is full of tools.  It is not a space to mill around in.  It is a place always under construction.   A place I was one of the first to enter, stake a claim and build.  The only memory of working with Steve Jobs I am willing to share right now is when  a lot of us were sitting around  (I think it was a break room at one of Apple’s early offices by Xerox Parc but it might have been at Xerox Parc)  commenting on how we never wanted to be those old timers saying “remember when….” We would rather hang out on the edge even if it meant we may go over the cliff.  Steve Jobs died building brilliantly on the edge.  Sadly I think I am an old timer who fell off the cliff and survived but was never the same.

The Visitor – Resident categorization is also not a continuum as described in the video.  I can make a case that I am at each end of the extreme.  To make this point I’ll simply match my dissertation methodology to the words in the brackets on White’s Prezi.  I am performing a very sophisticated statistical cluster analysis (quantitative end of quantitative research) to help select participants for a narrative inquiry (qualitative end of qualitative research). 

All classification schemes are simply a way of helping us explain observed phenomenon. Boundaries and edges are often hard to classify.

I am too depressed over personal setbacks and Steve Job’s death to delve into the issue any deeper at this time.