New Ed Models Require New Staffing Models

New K-12 educational approaches that encourage personalized and blended learning—the latter replacing a portion of traditional face-to-face instruction with web-based learning—are running afoul of the typical one-teacher-one-classroom structure. The new models pile additional tasks onto teachers already burdened by an overwhelming workload, in most cases handled solo.

Effectively implementing these new learning strategies will require adopting equally new staffing strategies, according to a new report, Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning, compiled by the Clayton Christensen Institute and Public Impact.

The report’s authors examined how eight district, private, and charter schools and school networks used a variety of new arrangements to better support personalized and blended learning. They identified a number of elements key to the success of these endeavors:

• New roles for educators, including teacher-leaders heading small instructional teams, collaborative teams of teachers, support staff who tutored or mentored students to increase one-on-one or small-group interaction, and teachers in training who taught as part of their on-the-job learning.

• Intensive collaboration on small teaching teams to develop instructional skills faster and gain broader insights into the needs of individual students.

• Intensive coaching that involved weekly or even daily observation and feedback.

• Paid fellowships and residencies that allowed schools to establish their own pipeline of future instructors.

Increasing teachers’ pay was often needed to gain buy-in for their taking on added work and new responsibilities. Some schools stretched their student-to-teacher ratios to make teachers eligible for higher pay, while others brought lower-paid support staffers, trainee teachers, and volunteer tutors into the classroom to shoulder some of the duties.

“The organizational inertia of traditional staffing arrangements may take some time to change,” the report noted. “But as schools like these produce strong results and then refine and codify their practices, more schools across the country will have the will and the means to follow in their footsteps.”

Online Testing May Widen Achievement Gap

Proponents say computer-based standardized tests are more secure than traditional paper-and-pencil testing, can be scored faster, and allow questions to be designed more innovatively. They also see online testing as good preparation for students facing a job market that more and more emphasizes tech capabilities.

However, some educators say that moving to computerized testing is actually increasing an achievement gap they’ve worked for years to shrink.

Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data in 2015 found that about five million households with school-aged children didn’t have a high-speed Internet connection at home; many of those were low-income black or Hispanic households.

A March 2017 Pew post indicated that the divide persists, with nearly half of households with an annual income below $30,000 not having broadband service or a desktop or laptop computer at home. Researchers report that the majority of teachers in poor districts claim their students aren’t prepared to take online tests. Some schools have so few computers that each student only gets access once a week.

“Putting the test online just sets the city kids three steps back,” Jessica Shiller, associate professor of education at Towson University, Towson, MD, told The Washington Post. “It’s more a measure of income than skill.”

Instructors are put in the unenviable position of having to teach both class content and computer use to prepare their students for high-stakes tests such as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests, which cover English and mathematics for grades 3-11.

Louisiana Finds Way to Deliver Good OER

While open educational resources (OER) are often touted as an important step in keeping the cost of course materials in line, finding quality materials can be a problem, especially for K-12 instruction. Teachers surfing the web for individual lesson plans is not really an ideal way to deliver excellent content.

“There’s more bad OER out there than good; that’s a fact,” Rebecca Kockler, assistant superintendent of academic instruction for Louisiana, said during a panel discussion at the recent SXSWedu conference. “We need to find the quality stuff and elevate it for everyone.”

The Louisiana Department of Education has taken a positive step in the right direction by making integrated curriculum available on its website. The content is aligned with the state’s core standards and adaptable to the needs of individual students, providing teachers with more time to just teach.

The Louisiana approach also couples professional development for teachers with the sharing of best practices and curricula, and it’s paying dividends. A 2017 study found record growth in the high-school graduation rate and the rate of college attendance. In addition, the research noted that state fourth-graders had the highest learning gains in the nation in a national reading assessment test in 2015.

“Using OER wasn’t our goal,” Kockler said. “Quality was our goal.

Teachers Remain Wary of Social Media

Many grade- and high-school teachers remain hesitant to use social media as a learning tool. Just 16% of the 1,000 K-12 teachers who responded to a survey from the University of Phoenix said they use social media in the classroom, while 56% said they don’t use it at all and have no plans to start.

Most teachers in the survey (83%) worry about conflicts from social media interaction and 35% said they had experienced issues with either students or their parents through social media. At the same time, some see the classroom as the right place to discuss social media.

“In the classroom is the perfect opportunity to talk about how we behave, what is ethical inside and outside our classroom, and what that entails,” said Pam Roggeman, academic dean at the institution’s College of Education. “Its fun and it’s interesting, but it brings with it a large responsibility.”

The survey also found that 63% of teachers said they use technology every day and another 25% use it at least once a week. At the same time, about a quarter of the teachers admitted being at least somewhat intimidated by their students’ technology knowledge.

“That surprised me,” Roggeman said. “If there was ever technology in my classroom I didn’t understand, I’d ask students for help and invariably five hands would go up. One of teachers’ greatest classroom resources is their students.”

Strategies to Bridge the K-3 ‘Device Gap’

Just over two-thirds of K-3 teachers reported that on at least one occasion they’d refrained from assigning homework because they didn’t think all their students had access to the technology or digital media needed to complete the work. That percentage was even higher for schools serving a greater number of low-income students.

In the same online survey of educators and parents, conducted last year by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Center for Early Learning, 40% of parents said that challenges with home technology access hampered their children’s ability to stay on pace with their peers.

Based on the survey and in-person conversations with parents, the foundation suggested five strategies for how instructors can help bridge the school/home “device gap”:

1. Inform parents about how their children are using technology and which digital media are being used in the classroom.

2. Recommend specific programs and apps students can use at home to complement what’s being used at school. Since poor Internet service and data limits are among the most common technology hurdles at home, consider programs that don’t require Wi-Fi or cell service to run after being downloaded.

3. Host a parent-teacher learning exchange in your school or across your district to explain how appropriate content is chosen. While teachers aren’t expected to have every answer on devices and apps, the survey and discussions indicated parents do view them as trusted partners for advice on technology use.

4. Rather than focusing solely on scary messages about the potential harmful effects of device use on young children, take a balanced approach that promotes how to “learn and live well” in a world where technology and connectedness are ever more ubiquitous.

5. Connect parents to their local library as a source for increasing their access to technology and further mentoring on appropriate use for young children.

Twitter Goes to School

Despite all the anxiety over Twitter’s impact on civil discourse and society in general, more and more educators are finding the social platform a valuable tool for sharing assignments, increasing student engagement, and archiving classroom resources.

In intermediate and high-school grades, Twitter can be used to connect with students where they already are. One New Jersey high-school teacher found that students checked her classroom Twitter account more often than they read school emails.

Some school systems or individual instructors may be dubious of Twitter’s value or uncertain about what sorts of content they should tweet. In a blog post, Steve Williams, co-founder of Campus Suite, a provider of cloud-based communications solutions for schools, set out four areas where Twitter can and should be used by educators:

1. Enhancing student engagement—Any additional channel for communicating with students is a plus. In addition to tweeting project due dates and reminders about quizzes and tests, teachers can send links to class notes and even design projects that encourage students to use the platform to connect with each other (such as comparing their interpretations of a reading assignment) or with others (such as professionals in an industry being studied).

2. Community engagement—Twitter is a quick and easy way to share classroom news and student accomplishments with the broader community, including other school systems.

3. Connecting with parents—Almost any parent knows that classroom information isn’t always passed on to them by their offspring, so Twitter provides another path for ensuring everyone is kept in the loop, whether the content is a class reading list, a field-trip reminder, or an emergency alert.

4. Extending the school’s reach—Twitter can also deepen connections with a school system’s wider network of vendors, consultants, boosters, and board members to generate interest in new programs or support for fundraisers or a tax levy.

Picturing a New Form of Literacy

Recorded human communication began with cave paintings and then grew into murals and hieroglyphs before developing into written alphabets. In some ways, digital technologies and social platforms are taking communication back toward its visual origins.

In a commentary in T.H.E. Journal earlier this year, Cathie Norris, a professor and chair in the School of Information at the University of North Texas, and Elliot Soloway, a professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, noted that K-12 students spend far more time with text-based materials in school and far more time with image-based materials outside the classroom.

With an average of about 2.5 billion daily Snaps on Snapchat, and more than 400 million daily users partaking of Instagram’s shared photos and videos, it’s no surprise that today’s digitally savvy students are gravitating toward “picting,” the use of images instead of words to convey information and ideas.

Picting is an emergent form of literacy, but not one that many schools are embracing. That presents a risk that students who aren’t able to access the same tools in the classroom that they do outside of it may see schoolwork as irrelevant to their lives.

The solution, of course, is not to supplant written communication with picting, but to make reading and writing as engaging as picting’s imagery, and to teach writing as a way to support and improve visual communication.

“Schools must teach written literary skills,” Soloway responded to comments on his and Norris’ post. “This is a teachable moment. Educators can use the Snapchat/Instagram story to help students craft good stories.”

A recent post on the EdSurge edtech news site offered suggestions for how to use Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and Seesaw, The Learning Journal, to help give students “ownership of their learning” and make the classroom more engaging for digital natives.

However, engagement can’t be the only metric. Because many complex ideas can’t be communicated with images alone, effective reading and writing skills remain paramount.

They’re also a necessity for full participation in society. As recently as just a century ago, illiteracy could prevent the poor from full participation in their rights as voters and citizens. In an age of “fake news” and calculated disinformation on social media, critical reading skills may be more crucial than ever.

K-12 Teachers Still Divided on Edtech Use

While more k-12 instructors are employing education technology on a daily basis in their classrooms—63% this year, a bump up from 55% last year—a quarter of them still report being intimidated by their students’ use and knowledge of edtech, according to an annual survey from the College of Education at the University of Phoenix.

Just over a third of the more than 1,000 respondents blamed inadequate funding for not making greater use of edtech, with 23% citing concerns that technology is too distracting. Even though two-thirds acknowledged that using classroom tech helps their students remain more engaged, more than 70% said that use of personal devices is a distraction in group settings, a rise from 65% in the 2016 survey.

When it comes to their own edtech skills, 40% of K-12 teachers said they'd give themselves a grade of "C" or failing, while only 16% gave themselves an "A."

Closing In on 100% Classroom Connectivity

Huge gains have been made in classroom connectivity, but work still remains to be done, according to the 2017 State of the States report from EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco that serves as an advocate and consultant for states and school districts to obtain high-speed Internet access for all classrooms.

In 2013, 40 million students were unable to meet the Federal Communications Commission’s 100 kilobits-per-second minimum connectivity goal for digital learning. As of this year, that number has been reduced to 6.5 million students, with 748 districts still requiring upgrades to effectively use the Internet in their classrooms. EducationSuperHighway’s goal is to have every student in the country connected by 2020.

Responding to a Funds For Learning survey, almost 80% of school districts and libraries credited the federal E-rate program for their faster Internet connections. E-rate is shorthand for the Schools and Libraries Program of the Universal Service Fund, administered by the Universal Service Administrative Co. under direction of the FCC. The largest federally funded education program, it gives discounts to help schools and libraries secure affordable and safe telecommunications and Internet access.

In addition to E-rate, EducationSuperHighway noted that 46 state governors are supporting legislation to improve affordability, increase fiber-optic connections, and get Wi-Fi into every classroom.

“Access to high-speed Internet is no longer considered a luxury but a basic necessity for 21st-century learning,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf stated in the report.

Teaching Teachers about Digital Citizenship

As electronic devices have become ubiquitous for children of almost any age, and many districts either provide devices or implement bring-your-own-device programs, schools are now being tasked with teaching digital citizenship, a catch-all phrase for safe, responsible, and appropriate use of online resources.

One major initiative in which they can participate is Google’s Be Internet Awesome campaign.

This month, Google expanded that program to educators with its free Digital Citizenship and Safety Course. The aim is to provide instructors with the basic skills needed to ensure their students remain safe and have a positive online experience.

The course comprises 12 lessons divided among six units, with topics that include savvy searching, maintaining your online reputation, setting strong passwords, evaluating the credibility of digital sources, and avoiding scams and phishing attacks. Teachers can then incorporate what they learn into their own curricula.

Paper Still Has a Place in Digital Times

Despite the proliferation of electronic devices in classrooms today, the vast majority of college students (93%) and seventh- through 12th-graders (87%) still see paper as an essential component for reaching their educational goals. While these numbers come from an understandably print-biased source—the Paper and Packaging Board’s Paper and Productive Learning: The Third Annual Back-to-School Report—they jibe with many other recent studies.

In the report, almost 95% of parents said they see their children do well on homework completed on paper, while more than 72% noted having seen their child have difficulty staying focused when working on homework on a tablet or computer. More than 88% said their child remembered assignments better when he or she wrote them down on paper.

The youngest students surveyed, seventh- and eighth-graders, agreed that they learn information best when they write it down by hand. Slightly more than half of college-age students still gave the same answer, and 81% said they always or often use paper tools to prepare for tests.

A Princeton University researcher told NPR that people who type onto a device during a lecture attempt to take their notes verbatim, while those who write their notes longhand are “forced to be more selective—because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material they were doing benefited them” in their learning.

Surprisingly, there isn’t as much research as one would expect exploring the benefits of and differences between reading on a screen and on a page. A recent paper published in SAGE Journals’ Review of Educational Research found that of 878 relevant studies published from 1992-2017, just 36 directly compared digital vs. print reading and reliably measured learning by the two methods.

New 3-D Printer Does Full-Color

XYZprinting Inc. is rolling out an advance in 3-D printing: the da Vinci Color, which turns out full-color 3-D objects using a proprietary inkjet process during the build. Available now for preorder, schools can get a 10% education discount off the pricetag.

The company also offers K-12 Steam, a collection of 3-D project curricula that can be incorporated into the classroom.

Parent Groups Want Age Cap on Smartphones

A mom from Austin, TX, has created a “Wait Until 8th”pledge to encourage parents not to give their children smartphones until they’re in eighth grade or at least 14 years old. Brooke Shannon’s pledge asks that parents vow “not to give your child a smartphone until at least eighth grade as long as at least 10 other families from your child’s grade and school pledge as well.”

So far, more than 2,000 parents from 500-plus schools in 49 states have committed to the pledge.

Shannon acknowledges that the pledge may not be appropriate for families with children who need more advanced technology to help manage a medical condition, such as Type 1 diabetes.

For parents who need to be able to connect with their children, either for emergencies or for those involved in shared-custody arrangements, Shannon suggests a lower-tech option such as a basic flip phone.

There is a groundswell of similar movements around the U.S., such as Parents Against Underage Smartphones (PAUS), a Colorado-based organization that wants to ban sales of cellphones to anyone under age 13. PAUS is working to gather signatures for a proposed ballot initiative that would require retailers to ask customers the age of the intended primary user for a cellphone. Merchants that repeatedly sell phones for use by preteens and younger children would be subject to government fines.

Public Ed Asset Used for Private Gain

At a time when the Census Bureau reports a quarter of U.S. households are without Internet access, critics contend that a federal program to shrink that gap is broken, with much of its revenues enriching nonprofits and commercial operators while many low-income and rural students are left still bereft of needed access.

The Educational Broadband Service (EBS) grants school districts and educational nonprofits free licenses allowing them to use a portion of spectrum—the range of frequencies that carry radio and the mobile Internet—to offer instructional services using low-power broadband and high-speed Internet access.

EBS traces its origins to a post-Sputnik push in the 1960s to modernize American education, with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allotting a section of spectrum to encourage teaching by television. Since then, the government has given away thousands of licenses. When spectrum use officially shifted from TV to the Internet in 2004, the value of those licenses suddenly shot through the roof.

One observer told The Hechinger Report that “licensees got blindsided by a bunch of money,” with commercial operators offering cash payments running from tens of thousands of dollars up to millions to lease spectrum in a major metropolitan area. Many license-holders chose to lease up to 95% of their spectrum instead of using it for public purposes. It’s estimated that about 90% of the approximately 2,400 EBS licenses have been at least partially leased, many of them for 30 years.

The majority of EBS licensees have just one or two licenses, but over the years a handful of nonprofits have accumulated a national network of 50 or more spectrum licenses.

“Think about the amount of pure lease payments they receive for this public asset that they don’t own, which they’ve been given to steward,” said Zach Leverenz, founder of EveryoneOn, a nonprofit whose aim is to eliminate the digital divide.

While a fraction of those big nonprofits’ revenue from leased spectrum does support providing students, seniors, and other groups with broadband access, reviews of tax disclosures show that in at least one case, about three-quarters of those revenues were instead directed into savings and investments.

Leverenz has called for greater accountability and transparency for the program, but the FCC has demurred from making any changes, stating that the best course is to continue relying on “the good-faith efforts of EBS licensees.” 

Take-Home Devices vs. ‘Summer Slide’

More school districts are allowing students to take home school-issued devices over the summer break to reduce learning losses known as the “summer slide.”

There is no research yet to back the success of the practice, but educators say they hope that letting students use school laptops or tablets to extend learning through the summer will bridge the gap between haves and have-nots by providing access to students who otherwise wouldn’t have it.

“Summer is the most unequal time in America,” Matthew Boulay, interim CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, told NPR. “I think we tend to have this idyllic view of what childhood summers are, but the reality is that for kids living in poverty, summer can be a time of isolation and hunger.”

There are, however, observers concerned that districts need to supply parents with instructions on proper device use at home so the technology isn’t wasted on games rather than educational content and so it doesn’t pull kids away from family activities during the summer.

U.K. Detox Camps Help Teens Unplug

After touring secondary schools and surveying students ages 13-18, the founder of a British “digital detox” company said she’ll expand its services this spring to include teenagers.

Tanya Goodin of Time To Log Off found that 29% of the young people she polled said they spend more than eight hours a day online, and more than a third regularly fall asleep at night with their phone or laptop in bed with them.

In the U.S., in response to a December 2016 survey of more than 4,500 college students by NACS’ OnCampus Research, a quarter said they spend two hours every day on social media, 19% said three hours, 14% said four hours, and 9% said five hours. Three percent admitted actually devoting 10 hours every day to social media.

Unlike Internet-addiction treatment centers in China, which are run more like army boot camps, Time To Log Off’s three-day teen retreats in Britain will emphasize team-building and creative activities such as painting, cooking, and photography.

Richard Graham, a London psychiatrist, told The Guardian newspaper that schools should be looking into running their own digital-detox programs, especially close to midterm and final exams. He said what’s needed is a “systemwide approach, with clean times and clean zones where everyone switches off.”

Primary Schools Face Phones in Classrooms

Phones, tablets, and other electronic devices have become ubiquitous in high school and higher education. Now, they’re turning up in the hands of elementary school students as well, with one recent study finding that children in the U.S. get their first cellphones at about age 10. That has districts scrambling to devise rules to govern their use.

At some schools, phones can only be used for emergencies. Other districts still ban cellphones in primary schools, with an option for families to seek a waiver if their child needs to have a phone with them at school.

Some educators and parents are concerned about the impact phones could have on the culture of elementary school, including the fact that they might exacerbate divisions between haves and have-nots. There are also issues about access, such as using a district’s network vs. a private provider that might not be set up to filter inappropriate content. The presence of phones in the classroom also adds to teachers’ responsibilities.

“I don’t want to spend my time monitoring inappropriate cellphone usage when I could be using that time for instruction,” an elementary school teacher in Silver Spring, MD, told The Washington Post.

New Guidance on Kids and Screens

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently published its updated recommendations on children’s media use.

Where the organization previously recommended no screen time at all for children under two and that children older than that be limited to no more than two hours of electronic media, it now eases up on the restrictions and acknowledges that digital content is not only ubiquitous but also has benefits as well as dangers.

AAP still advises against screen time for children under 18-24 months, although it does now make an exception for video chats via such services as Skype or FaceTime, which can help nurture relationships with long-distance family members.

It also no longer recommends specific screen-time limits for elementary school-aged children or teenagers, saying that decisions on digital media use for those age groups should depend on the individual child and the type of media. The organization does advise that parents “co-view” with younger children, talk about what they’re watching, and discuss online safety and citizenship.

Not surprisingly, the recommendations also say kids should engage in unplugged playtime and get proper exercise and sleep every day, which includes not having any devices in their room at night and avoiding screen use in the hour before bedtime.

Along with its guidelines, the AAP rolled out a new interactive online tool to help parents craft a household media plan to establish appropriate guidelines for each child. Parents can stick with AAP’s age-specific guidance or add in their own family rules, addressing such items as device-free times and areas, what sort of media to avoid, privacy settings, and more.

Experiment to Help Low-Income Students

To make it possible for more low-income high school students to get a head start on college, the U.S Department of Education is investing about $20 million in the 2016-17 school year on an experimental dual-enrollment program available through 44 colleges nationwide.

“The hope is that this investment will accelerate students toward completion,” said ED Secretary John B. King Jr. in an article that appeared in eSchool News.

The program will allow participating institutions to begin offering Pell grants to eligible students in July. High school students have to complete the Free Application for Federal Aid form to determine eligibility. Students who qualify can receive grants for up to 12 semesters with a maximum award of $5,815 for the 2016-17 school year.

According to the department, fewer than 10% of children in the bottom fourth of household incomes earn a bachelor’s degree by the age of 25.

“The courses students take while in high school and the support they get to succeed in those courses are major factors in not only whether students go to college but also in how well they will do when they get there,” King said in an article for U.S. News & World Report. “The more rigorous and engaging the classes are the better.”

Using Music Videos to Teach Science

The idea that music can teach science has shown enough potential that a website has been created for K-12 instructors to find music videos that provide students with scientific content. Now, a study has been conducted by researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, to find out if it actually works.

The research, published in the International Journal of Science Education, tested the hypothesis that scientific content can be learned through songs, by studying more than 1,000 students using 16 music videos in three separate tests.

The first test of students, ages 8-17, found that those who watched a music video that delivered scientific content did learn some of the information that was provided. A second test found no evidence that the music video helped students when compared to a traditional instructional video, although it was more enjoyable to watch.

A third group of New Zealand seventh- and eighth-graders were randomly assigned to watch a music video about fossils and compared to another group that was assigned a video with the same content but with no music. Both groups showed improvement on test scores immediately after watching the video, but the group that watched the music video did a better job on assessment tests 28 days later.

“These studies are only preliminary, but point to the promise of novel approaches to formal science instruction,” Tania Lombrozo, psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an article for National Public Radio. “Incorporating music and other media might not only have mnemonic benefits, but also help make science more accessible and more engaging to a broad range of students.”