For Whom the Test Tolls

Why do (some) students cheat on tests? Because they want the test to show better results. Because poor test results will put them in a worse state than good test results. Because they don't want to be judged by poor test results. Because thy don't want to be damned by poor test results. The test is an enemy to be conquered or avoided... Now that's useful.

In the Internet age where it's very easy to create a poll, university professors and judges find themselves being evaluated by students and lawyers respectively. They hate it, and fight it with all the eloquence you would expect from those who make a living by talking and writing. But beneath the learned reasoning for not subjecting themselves to evaluation, what is the problem? Same as with the cheating students: They don't want to be judged and damned. They also don't want to be in the inferior position of reporting to anybody, though if they were guaranteed a glowing report, they may not mind too much.

A similar state of affairs exists wherever a guild manages to keep the power to define the mechanisms that govern it, but this post is concerned only with K12 students. Fixing the rest of the world will have to wait a few weeks.

The students are right: Regular exams at school are designed to judge them. The teacher grading the test may scrawl a few words of reprimand on the wrong answer, but the test as served its purpose as soon as a mark is assigned. Seldom will there be a follow up with a specific student on a specific error. Usually, no one expects to learn from a test. Testing is not part of the learning process. It's an overhead and, may I humbly suggest, a distraction.

I propose to start by deciding that all of what we do at school should directly promote learning - as much as possible. The great majority of tests, quizzes, evaluations etc. should be part of a feedback mechanism (see post) to improve teaching and learning. An exam examines the state of the teaching/learning; it doesn't evaluate if a student is good or evil. It would take an effort, but testing can be repositioned - reframed - as feedback:

The test's questions, even before they are answered, tell the students what the teacher expected them to have learned, and to be able to do. Just reading the test, the student can learn something new. Possible feedback messages from reading the test include: "Hey, you didn't teach that" (feedback to the teacher) or "I see I missed a whole aspect of what I studied" (feedback to the student) or "This test is too easy - we know more than that, so it doesn't provide enough relevant feedback" (feedback to the teacher).

Having answered the questions, or performed the tasks prescribed by the test, and having a teacher or peer review and comment on them, the student gets finer feedback, like: "I see I misunderstood part of the issue" or "The reviewer didn't understand my answer, because I didn't express myself clearly".

Reviewing the results for a whole class can provide extra feedback to the system: Good results mean teaching was done well, and there may be something useful peers can learn from the teacher. Slightly poor results mean teaching methods should be improved. One-time seriously bad results mean the curriculum should be temporarily adjusted to go over the material again, probably with a different method.

Reviewing the results from many classes, accounting for different teaching methods is called "research." It provides feedback for the whole education system. Comparing such results can enable improvement of teaching methodology over the whole system.

Reality keeps interfering: Judgement and damnation are not completely eliminated: Only in extreme cases, when the feedback doesn't work, will the tests ultimately will result in unpleasantness. For example, consistently poor results for a specific teacher's classes may mean the teacher should be removed. Consistently poor results for a student may ultimately mean having to move to a different class, with possible difficult social status consequences. The trick is to keep the main mass of testing as a feedback mechanism, for the benefit of the mainstream students. At the extreme bottom - we haven't solved the problem yet.

Grading and comparison: There is a view that says that every student must be treated strictly as an individual, and not be compared with others. But out-of-school reality doesn't work that way: When a company considering hiring an employee, or promoting an employee, it doesn't use individualized assessments: The contenders are graded and are being compared, and the one with the best weighted sum of qualifications - wins. Even closer to the students' lives, in sports - the fastest runner gets the gold; not the one who tried most. So, a side effect of testing can remain the grades. Competition over grades can be a powerful motivator, though care should be taken to avoid cutthroat competition that seeks to harm the competition instead of advancing oneself.

One aspect of potentially constructive grading and comparison is international tests, which provide feedback for the whole system, showing its standing in comparison to other national education systems. What can we learn from Finland? What can we learn from Singapore?

As always, careful research is required, but it seems that if tests are conceived primarily as useful feedback, they can become that.

The Main Course: Feedback

Borrowing from the wisdom of engineering: An education system is first of all just that - a system: A bunch of entities (students, teachers, schools, government, ...) which together form one entity that has some meaning for humans. The main expected output from the education system are the graduates, who have the skills to function in - and contribute to - society. Every education system is a complex system.

Let's consider a much simpler system - a washing machine: The machine needs to be filled with water in order to start washing. It could be done by opening the incoming water-pipe for a specified time, but then, if the water pressure is lower than we guessed, the machine won't be sufficiently filled; If the water pressure is higher than we guessed, the machine will overflow. We wouldn't think of using a guess. We would use a mechanism that will open the water pipe for just enough time to fill the water tank, but not enough time to cause a flood. We would use a float valve as a feedback mechanism to control the water flow. A system without feedback - an open-loop system - can only deal with expected and pre-analyzed circumstances. It would go haywire as soon as anything interesting happens in its environment.

The first half of the premise for this post is that education systems are by nature complex, and any complex system needs clever feedback loops in order to keep it running. In the case of an education system, part of the aforementioned "running" must be "adapting" and "improving", which requires even more sophisticated feedback loops. The second half of the premise is that most education systems function largely without feedback, or with the wrong feedback loops. Haywire is the steady state.

We can - and should - fill several books with specific discussions of the types of feedback necessary for a good education system, but for now I will just list a few domains for feedback mechanisms.

General:

• Measure what is deemed important, not what's easy to measure
• E.g., quizzes, research
• Get over the fear that being measured means being judged and damned
• Reward desirable behavior to build desirable habits
• Example desirable behavior: Success in personal assignments; Contribution to peers, to pupils and ward in general, to the system
• Example rewards: public recognition, inclusion in desirable work
• Not counter-productive rewards such as being allowed to play/vacation instead of study/work, which send the message that study/work is undesirable
• Penalize undesirable behavior to reverse undesirable habits
• E.g., private admonition, exclusion from desirable work
• Accountability - remove from a position where one causes harm
• Clearly separated from penalty
• The removal is public, not private and hushed
• Peer Review - less threatening, more economical and sends a positive message
• Percolation
• Mechanisms must be maintained for real-life information and insight to bubble upwards from students to teachers to principals to local governments to central education establishment
• Mechanisms must be maintained for research-based information and insight to seep downwards from central education establishment to principals to teachers to students
• Incentives determine behavior - Rewards and penalties must be in tune with the goals of the system

Students:

• Measurement
• E.g., skills more than crammed knowledge
• Reward
• E.g., for making a significant effort to learn
• E.g., for success in learning, as measured
• Penalty
• E.g., for doing slipshod work
• Accountability
• E.g., a student who disrupts the classes can be removed from a lesson, and even from the school
• Peer Review by other students
• Same age, older

Teachers:

• Measurement
• E.g., video-record classes, to allow later analysis
• Reward
• E.g., for students earning rewards
• Penalty
• E.g., for students receiving penalties
• Accountability
• E.g., a teacher who performs poorly must be removed from the position of harming the system and students
• Peer Review
• Teachers should talk more amongst themselves about problems, successes and failures. Engineers do that a lot

School Management:

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Local government education officials:

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Central government education officials:

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Teacher Education establishment

• Measurement, Reward, Penalty, Accountability, Peer Review

Far-from-bottom line:

The mess of bullet-points above can be used as a minimal skeleton for looking into the issue of feedback. Existing research needs to be studied; existing thinking needs to be reviewed; more work is necessary to formulate a suggested structure and connections between the different stakeholders in the education establishment. The existing education systems need to be gradually improved towards the ideal. The ideal will often turn out (based on research) to have been wrong, and will have to be revised. Hopefully, with the right feedback loops, the system will tend to keep improving.

Just to make sure I don't sound too cheery: With the wrong feedback loops, any system will tend to fall apart.

The Ultimate Knowledge Work

The term Knowledge Worker was coined by Peter Drucker, and means a person whose main work "material" is knowledge. Using knowledge and developing knowledge as part of their work. A term that created to describe a budding trend in work-life, now describes more than 50% of employees in developed nations.

This term should emphasize teachers. It should have been created for teachers - for as long as there were teachers (thousands? hundreds of thousands of years?), they were the ones working with knowledge as their main material: Using knowledge, Developing knowledge for and in their students, developing their own knowledge. The term Knowledge Work usually doesn't include students of all ages. But it should. What is being a student if not Knowledge Work? But for this post I will concentrate on the teachers as the ultimate knowledge workers.

If the term Knowledge Work is relevant to the discussion of teaching, it is worth a short discussion of relevant characteristics of knowledge work.
According to Drucker, knowledge workers should be treated as volunteers: It must be clear to them that their work is important; that their work is either being appreciated right now, or it will be appreciated when society understands what it is about; Knowledge workers can't be bribed into doing a good job, but probably wouldn't do a great job if the salary were an insult. They also expect personal satisfaction from work. On the other hand, knowledge workers are often willing to go beyond the job description, which is not very clear anyway with their type of work.

In general, volunteers and knowledge workers have expectations from their organization - beyond the paycheck, and beyond the convenience of the job, and often they are happy to give more. Strangely, teachers are not like other knowledge workers in this respect, at least in the less successful education systems: Most teachers in public schools in these countries are disillusioned, and expect very little from the system. Many of them are there exactly because of the relative convenience of the job. Many of them are worn-out, and it's difficult to maintain a sense of the importance of your work in such a state of mind.

How come? My guess is that the problem starts with the behavior of the education organization, and continues with the behavior of the public: The education establishment in such countries treats teachers as low level officials with a specifically prescribed job - exactly what to teach, when and how. What the organization offers is not satisfaction, but job security - no matter how good or bad the teacher is. The public treats teachers the same way - as low level officials, with no authority. As extras in a play, that can be easily replaced with any other extra. It's difficult to maintain a sense of the importance of your work in such an environment.

Teachers' status is an often lamented issue. We are told that it used to be much better. I am usually suspicious towards nostalgia, so I was very happy to see an account regarding the situation in the beginning of the 20th century, in A.S. Neill's Summerhill School - A new View of Childhood:

"I discovered long ago where a teacher really stands
socially. When I was headmaster of a village school and some function took place the laird came first, then the minister, then the doctor. I was down the table with the head gardener."

So, teacher's status is not a new issue, but these days it is becoming more and more out of place: We do respect knowledge work in general. Almost everybody wants their kids to be as much as possible in the "knowledge business", and if menial work needs to be done - they prefer their neighbours kids to grow up to do that. Teaching is the ultimate knowledge work, and teachers are those who can help our kids become knowledge workers. Moreover, in the world we are now creating for ourselves and our children, more knowledge needs to be accumulated before a person can be said to be a proper graduate; More knowledge will have to be acquired after graduation, so it is imperative that students develop skills and habits necessary for ongoing knowledge acquisition. This makes the teacher's importance even more critical than ever before.

What we need to do is bring our attitude as a public into sync with the reality: The teachers' job is extremely important. Accordingly, we must change the attitude of the education establishment in the same direction - not just as lip-service and a bunch of ads saying how important teaching is, but as a change in the teachers' working environment: Authority with accountability, personal development, support from experts and opportunity to contribute to the system. It may be too much to expect the salary to match the importance of the job, but living wages would be nice.

Naturally, when the status of a given profession is low, many people who could contribute a lot to that profession, go and look for another calling. In contrast with the general civil society, some organizations, such as the military, have an established pattern of selecting the best for teaching: The top graduates of any training course are offered a position as professional trainers. We live in a knowledge-based civilization. We respect those who work with knowledge, and wish our kids to work with knowledge. Discussing enduring importance as opposed to temporary urgency: It would be reasonable and wise, to treat the ultimate knowledge work - teaching - as the single most important profession in modern society.

Learning to Err

A few encouraging anecdotes, that have the extra advantage of being true:

1. A science teacher stands in front of a fifth grade class, and discusses the use of different materials. One of the students suggests using tin for building airplanes, and insists the teacher said that in the previous lesson. After trying to convince the student for a few seconds that she didn't say it, the teacher changes her method and says: "Ok, so I made a mistake having said that tin is good for making airplanes, now please correct me."

2. As part of a one-upmanship campaign, a young engineer jabs a more experienced engineer with a reference to an mistake the senior engineer made. The experienced one acknowledges the error and goes ahead discussing the right way to do things, without even noticing the jab.

3. In a “lessons learned” session, there was a debate about whether some type of activity was done well. Some of the participants say the activity was fine. One of the participants stands up and explains, without any apparent self-consciousness, how he did things wrong and what damage it caused, in order to make sure everybody understands the way things were done was wrong, and to make sure the next time a different method will be used.

Now back to the norm:

I am told by educators that kids these days are very worried about making mistakes, and about being wrong. This is not a great surprise: In polite circles of society, “criticism” is synonymous with “attack.” This implies that making mistakes is unacceptable, and people should adopt a don’t-ask policy about it. Enlightened grown-ups try to shelter children from the possibility of seeing a mistake they made, for fear it will damage the child's self-esteem. It is now considered wrong even to point out a child's spelling mistakes, lest the child becomes self-conscious. I suspect the effect of this sheltering is the opposite of building up self-esteem: There is a message here that we can't deal with mistakes. The possibility of an error becomes more frightening, and the fear of making a mistake has a paralysing effect. If I don't do anything, I don't have a chance for errors, right? If I don't try, I won't fail. Fear of making mistakes is a major impediment to learning.

Another effect, in the cases we manage to disconnect the kids from a sense of having erred, is of diminishing the sense that we can do something well or poorly (What is the politically correct term for "poorly"? "differently well"?) We end up with kids, university students, and adults who are not in the habit of making an effort to tackle something difficult where they may fail, but are likely to improve themselves in the process - this is a complaint I hear from some university teachers. Some of them (by my own observation - not a proper research) have very little sense of quality. For example, they do write with spelling mistakes, but they don't know it.

The teacher in anecdote 1 above, by admitting a mistake, showed the students that it's ok to make mistakes; that they should examine critically information given to them; and probably a few more lessons about self assurance, integrity and such. Who cares she never really did say tin was a good material for airplanes.

Here's a semi-wild idea: It may be useful to actively create opportunities for such teaching. A teacher can occasionally make an intentional mistake, admit the mistake, and let the students correct it. Later, the teacher can simulate a mistake, and let the students realize it on their own.

While we are at it, here is a fully wild idea: It may be useful to build opportunities to make mistakes into the normal course of learning. By giving a class an assignment that has a catch in it, and letting everybody get it wrong. They can all feel secure in the fact that they all made a mistake, so nobody is a fool, and nobody can be the subject of the dreaded criticism. At a higher level, the teacher can give a few exercises, in each of which, about half the class will fail. This will give most of the students an opportunity to be on both sides of the divide. When students are part of the mistaking half, it can increase their ability to deal with their own failure, since it is more difficult to be in a smaller group that made a mistake, than to be part of a whole class that did. When students are on the half that did the right thing, the repeating exercise can reduce the tendency to gloat and to belittle others, since the same students made mistakes just a while ago, and are probably going to make mistakes pretty soon. More advanced erring exercises can let just a small group make the error, or even just an individual. This practice is reminiscent of the cultural engineering exercises in Skinner's Walden two, which is good company.

But even with the tamer methods, if we have more teachers like the one in anecdote 1 above, we may end up with more adults like those in anecdotes 2 and 3: People who think that errors are inevitable when doing anything, and that the natural thing to do with a mistake is not to hide it, but learn from it and let others learn from it.

One more thoughts:

At the extreme end of a Mistake, there is Failure; and about that Winston Churchill once said: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

Tests and Announcements

Nobody likes a pop-quiz. It is stressful and - in my case - often embarrassing. In large organizations, the use of pop-quiz is not very common. Instead, they use pre-announced tests. Education establishments are large organizations, and most of the testing in the education systems I am aware of, are pre-warned.

An announced test has a few main characteristics: Firstly, by definition, it allows much time for studying; Secondly, the test itself is short in comparison to the studying; Finally, all the studying becomes irrelevant as soon as the test is completed, and with many people, they indeed manage to forget everything soon after the test.

What does an announced test simulate? To what in real life is it similar? Activities which we know in advance we need to do, which are by nature quite short, where it is very difficult to regroup in the middle the activity, and where failure is very costly. A few examples are commando-type military operations, activities by astronauts, and building unusual structures in extreme conditions. These are not very common activities for most people. A bus driver needs to be prepared all the time for all likely events on the road; A bank teller needs to know what to do with the request of the next customer, without preparing for a day; A mechanic needs to solve problems as they pop up, and not according to a 6-month plan. All these examples are not similar to a pre-announced test, and they are very similar to a pop-quiz: "Here is a problem you should be able to deal with - solve it now."

The good news about the common pop-quiz of real life, is that usually we don't have to remember everything by heart. The bank teller can refer to a policy book; The mechanic can refer to blueprints; Many can go and find relevant help on the Internet. Many can call on an expert. The case of the bus driver is different - there is no time to ask questions when somebody steps in front of the wheels. I will soon get back to that type of issue. The parallel in testing of individual learning achievements, is an open-book pop-quiz where a range of supporting materials is available for the individual being tested: Books, notes, limited access to Internet, and maybe even limited access to experts.

Back to the bus driver; Indeed any driver. The driver's real-life pop-quiz is along the lines of "you are driving on a highway; a car in front of you just stopped; you remember seeing another car in the lane to your right; you don't remember seeing any car in the lane to your left; no time to look in the mirrors to see which lane is vacant; in a second you are going to be riding the steering wheel of the car ahead of you, having killed a few people; DO something NOW." An announced test will do very little to verify a driver's ability to deal with the situation. An open-book pop-quiz will do very little. Actually, this example is so extreme that even a closed-book pop-quiz will not be enough. We would need either a simulation, or a real-life observation test, which is what we do for testing driving, flying, etc.

A less extreme example is that of a spoken language proficiency test. In real life conversation, it is very inconvenient to keep referring to a dictionary. Communication should happen with what the speakers have right now. This is a good example where a pop-quiz with no available materials can do a good job.

Bottom Line:

There are several different levels of testing: Announced tests with open or closed books, pop-quizzes with open or closed books, simulations and real-life observations.

There are several different take-home benefits from school: Habits, skills and knowledge.

Knowledge in real life is generally used with little urgency - the usual modern bustling - and with time to look and check. Very similar to an open-book pop-quiz. Knowledge is also often quite specific - there is often just one right answer to any given question, which lends itself even to multiple-choice quizzes.

Skills in real life are generally used with more urgency, and with less time to check and ask. Mostly similar to a closed-book pop-quiz. In some cases, such as driving, we need to go further - to simulations and real-life observations. Skills are less specific, in the sense that there are often a few right answers to any given need.

Habits in real life don't lend themselves to a discussion about urgency or about opening a book. They are very non-specific, in the sense that there are many reasonable responses to any given situation. If we want to evaluate habits, a simulation is a minimal tool; and we will probably have to go with real-life observation.

The vague case for pre-announced tests: It may be that preparing for an announced test is a good practice for memorization and conscious building of knowledge and skills. It may even be a basis for the good habit of putting a concentrated effort into studying something. Another value for an announced test could be found in a graduation ritual: Study for a month; go over everything learned; get tested for several hours -- now you have changed from a student to a graduate. All these taken together can justify some announced testing, but certainly not as a major tool for evaluation.

Experiments? NIMBY!

NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard - is the standard human response to many situations and proposals for the betterment of society. A new prison? A must, but not in my district. Move Guantanamo Bay prisoners? Certainly, but not in my state. Conduct research on education, with it's accompanying risk of error? Can't do without it, but not in my kids' school.

Usually the NIMBY response is discussed with disdain, because there is something inconsistent about agreeing something is necessary, but not being willing to shoulder a part of the burden. But while disdain makes the disdainer feel morally superior to the disdainee, which let's admit is a great feeling, it doesn't solve the problem: Unless we find another type of solution, we still need to build a new prison, and it is going to be in somebody's back yard.

The reason we parents are unhappy with research in our kids' school, is that we are very protective of our kids, and want nothing bad to happen to them. That's good. We also tend to be quite conservative with our kids (as well as with our own survival.) The sense is that what didn't hurt us yesterday is not likely to hurt us today, so why change and run the risk that the new thing will hurt us. Completing this tendency is the fact that meaningful research is not just observation, but trying something and seeing if it works. And often it doesn't work. For example, trying a new way to learn Math may create, in a year or two, a group of children who are a year or two - or more - behind in their Math studies. Nobody wants that for their kids.

In some cases, the solution to the NIMBY dilemma lies completely in the mind, and is relatively easy. Such is the case with research in education. Reality check: Our kids are already subject to risky trial-and-error.
Example 1: A new teacher in school - is he going to be great, mediocre, or terrible? Test as we may - we will have to wait and see.
Example 2: Teaching kids about he Internet - it has never been tried before, so who knows if we are doing it right? Worse: The Internet we teach about today is going to be obsolete in just a few years. Will the way we teach it now serve our children or not?
Example 1+2: The teacher who is known to have been a pretty good teacher for 20 years. Now that same teacher needs to teach new kids in the context of new technology, new society, new values... Is the teaching going to serve the kids or hurt them?
Example 3: Tried and true methods of teaching are based on the assumption that the teacher knows everything necessary for the kids to know, and is responsible to convey that knowledge. This is no longer the case: Knowledge is available through the Internet - much more than what we can expect the teacher to know; The kids often know facts not known to the teacher; What used to be true, is now often called into question; Authority in general is now limited - uncertainty rules. There are no tried and true methods to deal with the current reality, so many school systems are changing the teaching methods of everything beyond the ancient subjects of language and basic math. New teaching methods mean more trial and error.

What stems from these examples is that trial and its accompanying error are already here. They have to be here in order to deal with both ongoing and changing reality. The question we need to ask is not "do we want trial and error?" but "how do we want our trial and error?" I propose the answer: "Scientific, and well managed."

There should be certain rules to experimentation in a context that can cause damage to something important

1. No experiments that can cause irreversible damage.
   That's not a real problem with education - the human (child) mind can heal very well
2. Controlled experiments on limited population.
   Unlike some education establishment nowadays, which tend to experiment on the whole population at once
3. Close-up tracking to identify unwanted effects, and quick re-evaluation in such cases.
   E.g, If a new method for teaching reading and writing doesn't seem to work well - stop quickly
4. Total commitment to correct any unwanted effects - even if the cost is high.
   In the context of education, this may mean bringing a super-teacher to help children catch up with lost materials, or to help them regain a positive attitude towards a subject
5. Continuous involvement with the population. In the 21^st century, it is not a real option to keep the people in the dark regarding experiments being done on them.
   In the context of education, it's the population's parents.
6. Scientific methodology in general: Double blind tests; Control groups; Published results for peer review; Repeatable experiments, etc.

This sounds a bit like a political statement, but I think it can withstand serious scrutiny: Keeping to those rules, and probably a few more, can help minimize damage and maximize gain from the inevitable experimentation that goes on in the education system.

Wild Ideas - Student Teachers

All I ever learned about education, I learned from my kids. That's an oversimplification, but a useful oversimplification.

The 3-year-old wounded his lip, so the 7-year-old showed him an animated movie from the "Once Upon a Time ... Life" series, discussing the platelets and how they help fix wounds. The elder explained a few things to the younger. The elder got to practice teaching; She understood the issue better herself for having had to spell it out: It is a familiar experience - that explaining something to someone else improves our own understanding. Of course she also enjoyed the high status of knowing something - of being a teacher. BTW, did you notice the issue of a low status for teachers and teaching is not inborn but acquired? Young kids look up to those who teach them anything, and would like to be like those teachers. The young kid enjoyed learning, improved his esteem of his older sister. In general, the kids' relationship improved, and no grown-up had to be very active.

Everything worked out nicely. This is good news. The great news is that this sort of interaction is not a one-time accident. It has a name - "peer mentoring"; it is a natural way to transmit skills and knowledge; and it is scalable, and (this is where we are getting wild) it can be used to tackle directly the problem of class size, and the related problem of teacher attention.

In the extreme, it may be claimed that kids can teach themselves, as shown by Sugata Mitra's amazing discussion of the "hole in the wall." But even if we remain just wild but not extreme, and we build peer mentoring into the core of the schooling methodology - and not just as a curiosity - we may achieve a lot: A sense of empowerment to the mentor; Improved depth of understanding for the mentor; Practice of teaching (in real life we teach each other all the time); Much more personal attention concentrated on the learner (1:1 instead of 1:40); Freeing up the professional teacher to perform higher level tasks, such as directing the learning and observing individual learners and mentors.

The word "may" above is highlighted, to emphasize the fact that this is an idea - a claim - and not a fact. To establish the claim as a fact, we need research. That's a hassle, but the rewards may be great.

Long Term Results

So, we went through a few years of kindergarten, and 12 years of school. What have we got to show for it? What did we keep? Some studies were done to figure it out, but I would like to take a naive and fresh approach.

Before doing a comprehensive study, it would be good to feel the water - to get a few ideas about the direction to go. A simple survey can be a good start.

Subject-matter:

A comprehensive study would go over all the skills, materials and possibly habits taught at school. For the survey, e can select a just few subjects: English-as-a-second-language is a good candidate for a highly useful skill. Math is a good candidate for a common technical skill. History is a commonly taught non-technical subject. Habits are rather difficult to survey, so we can defer that part of the study to a later stage.

Audience:

The ultimate research should include people from 18-year-old K12 graduates to retirement and beyond. As a starting point, an initial survey would do less. First year university students are an interesting group. They are relatively well educated - otherwise they wouldn't have been accepted; Their attitude towards studying is apparently positive - for whatever reason - since they are interested in studying more. It would be particularly interesting to survey students who are going to different faculties: Some related to the subject matters chosen, like History; Some unrelated, like Medicine. The next interesting group would be 30-35 year-olds: Some may be professionals in fields that require Math and English, some not. With these people, usefulness of the studied material is the main issue - recognition and retention of information and skills not relevant to their life maybe less interesting. A wider study can include people approaching retirement. With them what they studied is less likely to be of any use anymore (when was the last time you used a slide-rule to calculate anything?). However, with the almost-retired, we may get a good sense of what can be useful across a lifetime.

Types of questions:

Recognition - in order to check if people recognize what they studied. Using the quadratic equation as an example, we can ask "Do you know what a quadratic equation is?" or show a quadratic equation and ask what it is. We may get very different results depending whether it's an open question or a multiple-choice.

Usefulness - "When was the last time you used a quadratic equation?" Let me guess: At 12th grade?

Retention - Solve this: "4.5X² - 10X + 8 = 0" Let me guess: You couldn't if your life depended on it? That's ok.

Another type of question that may be good for an initial survey, or can be deferred to an eventual study, is a question to check if the issue has a relevant Meaning for the surveyed person: "Can you give an example of where a quadratic equation is useful?" An example familiar to everybody is that of a stone being thrown. The stone carves - roughly - a parabola through the air, and a parabola can be described by a quadratic equation.

One last thought: Talking about such a survey, some people expect that the results will show very poor retention and usefulness, and that it is terrible. I agree only halfway: I also expect the results to show very low retention and usefulness, but I think it's great! It would mean that we probably don't need to learn as many different aspects of as many different subjects, and it will free a lot of studying-time for more important knowledge, skills and habits.

Customers

A few years ago, some hospitals started referring to patients as "customers." The intention was to improve the patients experience, by improving the personnel's attitude towards the patients. Now, bearing in mind the limitations of any analogy, I would still like to look into the idea of the student as a customer. We are more likely to think along these lines when the student pays huge amounts of money to a leading university, but let's expand the notion to K12 as well.

There is a false adage stating that the customer is always right. That attitude is dangerous to businesses, and even more so for a school - we can't have so many always-right customers running around, and maintain any sort of order. A better one is "The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer." Without a successful customer, there is no business. Without a successful student, there is no school. The difference is that in business, money is a major concern, while in K12 education - in many places by law - money must not be a concern. So success is considered along different lines.

With customers, there are always several layers of needs: What they say they need, what they think they need, and what they really need. It is advisable for the service provider to be able to tell the difference. If the service-provider gives the customer what the customer said they need, when the customer thought they need something else, it doesn't matter that the problem was first created by customer miscommunication - the customer will not be happy, and that's bad for business. If the service-provider gives the customer what the customer thought they need, while the customer really needed something else, it doesn't matter that the problem was first created by the customer misunderstanding their own needs - the customer will not be successful and will not be happy, and that's bad for business. Now here there is the tricky part of humility: The service provider doesn't always know all that much about the customer's perceived and real needs. But I believe any business can benefit a lot from making the effort to know. It pays in the end. Of course, if the business wants to provide a service which is different than the requirements stated by the customer - they need to show the customer why, and bring the customer around to agreeing with the provider's view, preferably before doing anything different than what the customer asked.

Same with the student as a customer: The student really needs some kind of education - nobody knows exactly what, but everybody knows it's extremely important. For the current discussion, let's say the student needs to be proficient in Math. The student probably thinks they need just to pass the next Math test. Depending on the culture in the school, the student may well say they don't care about Math at all. The teacher and the school must work in this reality, with the added complexity that there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of student-customers with somewhat different real needs, perceived needs and stated needs. The same way as with the business and customer, the teacher should see all levels of needs, and bring the student around to seeing the real needs. Unlike the business situation, in education we do expect the teacher-provider to know the real needs better than the student-customer, but humility is due here, too: The teachers should allow themselves to be convinced by the students - all is well as long as they agree on the goals.

A few more useful aspects of this analogy:

What happens in a business when an employee or partner tends to alienate customers, to make them unhappy - to lose customers? In a well-run business, that employee will be either moved to a more suitable (non-customer-facing) position, or removed from the company altogether. What happens in a school when a teacher alienates students and causes damage to their education; "losing students"?

In business, it happens that a customer causes damage to the business: Delayed payments, erratically changing demands, excessive complaints, slander, even direct damage to company equipment and personnel. It happens - quite seldom - that a customer becomes too much trouble, and some businesses know that they should "fire" that customer: Stop being willing to provide the services or goods to that customer. In school settings, sometimes a student is a lot of trouble - causing damage to the school and other students while not addressing his own educational real needs. What does the school do in such a case?

To summarize a long-winded post:

• School-Student relationship can be compared to Business-Customer relationship, with the student not always being right, but always being the main interest of the school


• Teacher and student should get to the same understanding regarding the goals of studying


• Teachers should not be in a position where they damage students and school


• Students should not be in a position where they damage students and school

Explaining to a six-year-old

Albert Einstein is said to have said that "If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself." Employing a basic rule of logic, it can be restated as "If you yourself understand something, then you can explain it to a six-year-old."

This is a very optimistic view, and my own experience supports it. Of course, I would explain things differently to a 6-year-old, a 16-year-old and a 26-year-old with a relevant high academic degree. Still, it can be explained to a child in a way that will be truthful and will give the child the great feeling of comprehension. It will strengthen the child's assumption that they can understand anything - nothing is too difficult. Wouldn't you want your child to have that self-assuredness?

Why is the sky blue?

A 16-year-old with fair education can probably use a simple scientific explanation, such as http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/sky_blue.html

A 26-year-old with a master in theoretical physics can be interested in a quantum-mechanics explanation of exactly why a certain molecule may absorb photons of certain wavelengths, why they may release them, and how to deal with the sad fact (or claim) that the atmosphere doesn't seem to contain the right type of molecules.

A 6-year-old can relate to a picture, such as the one from http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/BlueSky/blue_sky.html , with an explanation along these lines: The light from the sun has all colors in it; some colors, like the red go straight through the air; other colors, such as blue, collide with the air and bounce back towards our eyes, like from a mirror, even if we were looking at the sky and not at the sun.

Different explanations can be created for different age groups, different sociological background, different personal tendency of child and tutor, etc. Some explanations may involve experiments or observations.

For a while now I have been contemplating a wiki-style project, with Frequently Asked Questions answered in many different ways. Mere contemplation doesn't make it happen, but with a practically infinite Internet, someone is likely to do it one of these days.

Emotional Involvement in Learning

Before my daughter started first grade at school, I asked her what she wishes for at school. The first thing she hoped for was "that it will be fun for the kids who study." Fun is a major ingredient in a positive attitude. Grown-ups often forget or suppress this self evident truth. A teacher who is fascinated with teaching any material, usually makes it fun to learn.

Another ingredient is the sense that studying something will enable the student to do something useful that they couldn't do without studying. An expected empowerment. It could be a child's ability to gain independence by being able to read on their own, or to count money.

A more sophisticated type of positive motivation comes from the fact that we like to feel we are doing something important (grown-ups are very much into that). We respond to what we see as meaningful and relevant to our lives. An study subject may be deemed important, if it has something to do with buzz on public discussion: I see how my daughter responds to the issue of water shortage, and how she is genuinely interested in knowing about it, and doing something about it. Relevance can be local and specific. For example - acquiring an understanding of statistics at sixth grade, by studying the amount of homework to be expected in seventh grade as it compares to sixth grade - an issue that concerns the students and is perceived by them as very relevant to their life. Meaning and relevance can be in relation to an individual student's interests: It is easy for a child to learn about dinosaurs if they already captured his imagination.

The next set of motivators have to do with acceptance. It starts with praise from parents, teachers and other authority figures. This works well for the younger children, and can be easily provided to the student (ataboy!). The need for praise by superiors can be superseded to some extent with acceptance by peers, aka coolness. Harnessing peer acceptance as a tool to enhance study is a significant issue worthy of a book of its own. At a later stage of emotional development, we can expect a student to develop an internal voice that will give the student a sense of personal achievement of a worthy goal. It can be thought of as Self-Acceptance or a positive Super-Ego. The feeling of personal achievement can be promoted by giving the students some control over what they study, and by allowing them to complete manageable modules of study and gain success experiences.

Bearing in mind that humans are inherently geared towards learning, the fact that learning is often being discussed as a problem, means that powerful forces are working to suppress our tendency to learn. There are many "demotivators" around.

All the opposites to the motivators: Materials perceived as irrelevant - that the teachers don't manage to show the relevance to the students' life. For example, I talked with a well educated person about quadratic equations, and she said she had no idea what it was good for, other than for teaching and testing. It is not that hard to find the relevance. For example, whenever anyone throws a stone, the stone's path in the air is very similar to a parabola - the graph that describes a quadratic equation. But nobody has ever showed her any such example, to bring this aspect of math to life.
Destructive criticism (the opposite of praise) - belittling a child because of difficulty in studying anything, is not very helpful. Lack of coolness: In a group where it is considered uncool to study hard, it is very difficult to maintain the motivation to study.
Lack of success experiences - study material stretches from the beginning of the year to the end of the year without stopping to celebrate the completion of any subject. Having done a test, and feeling the relief of never having to think about the matter again - is nice, but not a good substitute to a sense of achievement.

Missing layers of understanding: Often the material being taught contains layers being built on one another. Especially in math, those layers tend to be stacked very high. As an oversimplified example: to understand addition, one needs to understand counting; to understand multiplication, one needs to understand addition; to understand powers, one needs to understand multiplication. Now suppose a student missed something about the concept of addition - maybe that of adding fractions. When the class studies multiplication, that student is in trouble; when the class studies powers, that student is lost. The problem is so acute in mathematics, that many ex-students maintain a deep fear of math.

Oppression: Too many rules without good reasons; too much work; a sense of the school system serving itself rather than the students; lack of power for the students to decide anything about what and how they learn. A feeling that the officials - teachers and others - don't respect the student. These and similar attributes of a school create a need to detach from studying in order to maintain a good relationship with the self.

Damaging messages from well meaning parents and teachers:

• "I always hated math" - The child of a parent with math anxiety is likely to hear a lot about how terrible math is. Not very helpful
• "This will (or won't) be on the test" - The test is the goal; knowing the material or acquiring the skill is not important on its own
• “If you finish in time, you get to play” - “play” is the reward, not a job well done, not the opportunity to do more, not the thanks of society
• unspoken displays of boredom - I can still visualize a history teacher who would almost fall asleep while droning the lesson. If he was that bored with the material, how could I suspect it is interesting? (15 years later I found out it was fascinating)

Backfiring of unsuccessful attempts to motivate:
False empowerment: Often, teachers explain that the reason to study this or that is that it is necessary for everyday adult life. This works for language and for basic math, but the students quickly learns (!) that for history, literature, civics, gym, etc. - it is not exactly the case. You can't fool all the pupils all the time, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.

False praise: Too much free praise has an inflationary effect - it doesn't mean much after a while.

False fun, false claims of relevance and importance, all can create a sense for the students that school in general is concerned not with real life, but with fake life, and that it is not worth an effort. All too often, this sense is justified.

The good news are as old as humanity: We love to learn; Apparently, more than any animal, we are designed to learn. We are hard-wired to be emotionally engaged in learning and to enjoy it. We should just find ways not to mess it up.

Education and The State

The case for state-managed education is quite clear. The case against state-managed education is worthy of some consideration.

For state-managed education:

• Financial stability: Mass education costs a lot. The state has that kind of money
• Curriculum stability: We want protection from unnecessary fashionable variations to teaching methods and emphases. Some central control is necessary for that, and the state can provide central control
• Common identity: We want a certain common ground in education for social cohesion, and maybe for national identity
• Equality: The quality of education determines, to a large extent, the economic future of a person. Central control can act to prevent weak education in weak parts of society, in order to avoid propagation of poverty or low status
• Worry about indoctrination: More and more - in the 21st century - we are worried about different groups running their own education, and indoctrinating students against "us"
• Worry about anarchy: We are afraid of anarchy in any context, including education

Against state-managed education:

• Poor management: With rare exceptions, the state isn't particularly good at managing anything
• Singapore may be the exception to states' management ability. It seems to be a unique example of a state that works
• Military force and other extremely violent means may be a justified exception for subjects best managed by a state. Not necessarily because the state is good at it, but because we don't want to deal with many warlords fighting over (or through) or heads. This idea of monopoly on violence is commonly accepted
• Indoctrination: Western society is moving away from a single truth, and towards many different individual truth. Centrally controlled indoctrination starts looking very wrong
• Inflexibility: The state is a naturally slow body, that can't deal effectively with change
• Society, technology and economy go through a lot of changes: Does anyone remember what it was like to get have an unplanned conversation with someone before cellular phones?
• The rate of change is very high: Just in the past few decades we got ubiquitous communication (cell-phones), ubiquitous information (Internet), ubiquitous trade (globalization), proliferation of NGO's of very different types (Médecins Sans Frontières, Al-Qaeda)
• The fast change rate seems to be sustained. Not only have we experienced many changes recently, we expect to keep experiencing fast changes. Education must respond to - if not predict - changes
• We do not know what types of vocations will be demanded from today's first graders

Why we keep asking the state to manage education for us:

• The "For" reasons influence us
• Though in some cases, the state can't fulfil the expectations: Financial Stability, Curriculum Stability and Equality are not always there, because of political issues and fashions
• The state has a natural instinct of demanding control over everything it can
• We want to be taken care of by something bigger than us

One way to go:

• Keep the state as the source of finance
• Sanction financial stability by law, or - if laws turn out to be too volatile - as part of a constitution
• Use varied distribution to assure equal opportunity for weak groups or municipalities
• Keeping the state away from direct management of the education establishment
• Create a strong central authority to control a core curriculum, and relevant testing. This is quite a balancing act. The central authority:
• takes its power from the state, but must not be under the direct influence of transient politics
• should determine what must be inside the core curriculum, and what must not be inside it. No grey areas
• should be very assertive regulating what's inside its jurisdiction, and very relaxed about what's outside its jurisdiction, allowing flexibility where it is due
• must avoid the natural tendency of structures of power to accumulate more power
• Leave power to other bodies to manage everything outside the core curriculum
• Municipalities
• Schools
• Teachers
• Parents
• Students

There is a mountain of details to be considered and fine-tuned. It may be that the whole concept drawn out here doesn't work. At the very least, this post shows that it is possible to think about the issue: What we get right now, what we want, and how we might be able to get from here to there.

Hear, See, Do

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

Confucius said that, and he was a sharp guy.

In school, most of what I did was listening (or trying to appear to be listening). So I heard much about History. Indeed I forgot just about everything I heard.

Sometimes a teacher would try to show us something, like an experiment in physics. Often it wouldn't work. I do remember those broken experiments I saw. No idea what they were supposed to be about, though.

In high-school, we did our own experiments in electronics. Got our fingers burnt with solder. I definitely understand it's not a good idea to hold a soldering iron with my bare hands.

In mass education, it's easiest to have students hear something about the studied material. It can even be done via radio. It is more difficult to have students see facts about and the nature of the subject matter, though these days it is much easier than even 30 years ago, with multi-channel television, and with the almost-infinite Internet. Thinking about it, I realize that much of my own memory about studied materials, that I retain from my school years, came from educational television that I was watching while I was home sick. It is the most difficult - in a mass education system - to have the students do something meaningful with the subject matter, so they gain real understanding and insight. A key word in the previous sentence was "meaningful." During my school years, I was given much homework to do; almost none of it was meaningful to me, and accordingly, I didn't learn much from it. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "just do it."

So, there is very little effort for an educational establishment to teach by hearing; more effort to teach by seeing; and most effort to teach by doing. A question pops up about whether the difficulty in teaching by doing is worth the effort. I don't know, because I have access to very little evidence (research) either way. But I want to ask another question to which I don't have the answer:

Is teaching by hearing worth even the relatively little effort involved?

What we can take home from school

The take-homes from school – the goals – can be discussed in the context of our expectations and our hopes for the graduate: Upper percentiles graduate, typical graduate and minimum requirements for formal graduation.

Whatever I wish for my own children is chiefly my own responsibility as a parent. I know of parents who are not interested in the education of the larger society, either because it is not their own responsibility, or because they are quite happy with the weak competition against their own children. I don’t subscribe to that point of view. While I am a believer in competition, and I like to be successful, I also like to compete against – and with – worthy opponents. It is more interesting, expanding, gratifying and fun. I wish the same fun for my children. So let’s take a wider view and look at the society of graduates into which my children will grow. This is the responsibility of the national or global education establishment.

There are a few types of goals we can have for any graduate of the schooling system:

• Knowledge - Just facts. Like “The capital of France is Paris”
• Skills - The ability to do something. Like adding any two whole positive numbers
• Habits - Tendencies, expectations, typical ways of responding to events. Like the tendency to assume that nothing is beyond one’s capability to understand it, and that one can learn anything
• Values - Morality, ethics. What’s Good and what’s Evil. Values vary a lot among people, nations, religions, etc. They have a place in an educational establishment only in homogeneous societies. Even as an individual I don’t feel homogeneous enough to discuss morality with great conviction, so I will stay away from the issue of values

Of the three remaining goal-types: Knowledge, skills and habits, knowledge is the easiest to deal with. Teaching can be achieved quickly: “You know, the capital of France is Paris.” Measurement of the success of teaching is straightforward: “What is the capital of France?” If the answer is “Paris” - teaching was successful, otherwise - teaching failed.

Skills are more difficult to deal with. It takes time to teach a kid to add correctly. It takes sustained concentration, repeated practice, etc. over many months. Measurement is not straightforward. For one thing, we can’t test the skill exhaustively: We can ask the students to add two specific numbers, or as many pairs of numbers we want, but ultimately we would have to say we tested enough and we believe the student can add any pair of numbers.

Habits are even more difficult to deal with. Developing the habit of assuming the ability to learn, takes building layer upon layer of experience. What happens when something is easy to learn, what happens when it’s difficult, what happens when one teacher could not explain something, and another teacher could. It develops over many years.

Habits, skills and knowledge interact with each other. With the habits of self-discipline and of assuming one can learn anything, the student - or the graduate - can acquire any skill they put their mind to. With the basic skill of reading, one can acquire any available knowledge they wish for, just by reading a book.

Knowledge is a commodity, in the sense that it can be acquired at any time in a person’s life.
Acquiring certain skills, such as a spoken language, are said to favor a certain age - a rather young age, at the beginning of K12.
Habits take a lifetime to develop. For example, a person’s assumption regarding what’s understandable and what is not, has its roots in very early childhood, in the responses to a two-year-old’s incessant “why?”

Since K12 education has the power of continuity over many years, it is a good vehicle to develop habits and skills. Acquiring knowledge in itself is less urgent, but knowledge is accumulated as a happy side effect of learning the skills of reading, listening, calculating, etc. Teaching various skills is also a good way to develop desired habits. With every skill successfully acquired, the students strengthen their habit of expecting everything to be learnable.

Setting the super-goal of giving the graduates every power to reach their own goals in life, here are some thoughts about the different goals; this time in the order of importance:

Suggestions for top priority habits and attitudes:

• Learning is fun
• Everything is learnable
• Critical thinking
• Self discipline
• Being a life-long learner
• Being a life-long physically active person
• Coping with frustration
• Coping with change
• Coping with uncertainty

Suggestions for top priority skills:

• Languages - as ancient as humanity
• Effective communication - as ancient as humanity
• One-on-one
• Public speaking
• Conflict resolution
• Arithmetic - as ancient as history
• Effective dealing with data - emerging - worthy of its own discussion

Suggestions for nice-to-have knowledge:

• History
• Any specific science, E.g., Physics
• Any specific social theories
• Geography
• Anything, really

Nice-to have skills:

• Math - as high as possible - a few hundred years old
• Scientific methodology - a few hundred years old

All of the above suggestions are an incomplete list of what I wish for myself, for my children, and for everybody else. The list reflects my own values, which I falsely claimed to leave out of the picture. Oh well.

Teaching and Salesmanship

"Oh, we don't want to learn anything from them!"

Even I cringe at the title, and I just wrote it. Mentioning of salespeople brings to mind an unpleasant experience of being harassed on the phone, on the way out of a supermarket, and when considering buying a used car. Occasionally, a salesman sells me a piece of junk, and after a day or two I find myself cursing both him and myself. Clearly this is not what I have in mind when I think of where teaching should go. There is also a good (as in non-evil) model of salesmanship: A financial adviser suggested to me a certain mix of financial tools for keeping a sum of money, and I went ahead and used it. A year later, I am still happy with that choice. A mattress salesman showed me a few options that he said would be good for me, and I bought one. Six months later, I am still happy with the choice. So, we can distinguish between a good sale and a bad sale by how happy the purchaser is after a while. A good sale makes everybody feel they did the right thing - even in the morning after.

Another type of selling that occurs often is that of selling an idea or a plan. "Let's go to the movies" is part of a sales pitch. Now the person interested in selling the plan needs to get the other person from a state of not-having-thought-about-it, to a state of wanting-to-go-to-the-movies. One way is to badger the poor soul (please please please please please) until they crack and agree. That's evil salesmanship. A different way is to find reasons why the other party would like to go to a movie: Maybe there is a particular movie they wanted to see; Maybe the movie can be restful; Maybe something else - good salesmanship is very personal. A naturally good salesperson often has a knack for finding what it is the other person would appreciate and want, and to find how it can be combined with what the salesperson wants. The best ones are quite empathic.

This is not the only possible way to look at teaching, but one useful model for teaching, is that of good salesmanship of ideas. The very first idea that needs to be sold to the students is: "It is good for you to learn this." Most of my teachers over the years believed they are teaching me something that is good for me to learn. In very few instances, the idea made it across to me. So, why did I study? They used a whole set of sales technique: Threatening, Badgering, Bribing, Inducing a sense of guilt and insecurity, Dubious claims of relevance, ... Sounds horrible? Sounds familiar? None of the teachers I ever knew were evil, but most of their techniques were.

In addition to getting students to buy into the idea of the importance of studying the subject matter, the teacher then needs to convey many messages and ideas for the students to accept willingly - or reject thoughtfully. There is constant selling of ideas going on, which is not easy. In mass schooling, another factor is the fact that the teacher needs to sell the same idea to a whole class of students at the same time, when each of the students may be in a different state of mind, so how can a personal sale be made? Some people can fire up a crowd. I had very few teachers who could. Here is another challenge for education, if we didn't had enough: How to make all teachers good sales people?

Continuing the analogy with the world of business: How do you make the job of salespeople easier and more effective? It's all in the marketing:

• A good product: What it is that we teach? What details are important for all students to acquire? What details can be left aside?


• A great value proposition for the students: What does a student get for the trouble of studying a lesson, a subject, at school in general?


• A good sales-kit: Up-to-date books; Physical teaching aids; Access to a super salesperson for help when needed


• An ongoing training program: Keep teachers up to date with the changing teaching material; Practice techniques to convey the particular ideas


• An effective feedback system: Measure the success of teaching each subject matter, in the system as a whole, and for each teacher. Learn from the results of the measurements

Human endeavor has many facets and disciplines. Each of them is advanced in some respects, and lagging in other respects. At this point in time - early 21st century - Education can benefit from looking at certain business practices, such as Sales & Marketing. It would be strange if the establishment in charge of teaching avoided learning from others.

Pedagogic Urgency

"Competitive Urgency" is a term coming from the world of business. This term was used by Marvin Bower, in his 1966 book, The Will to Manage. Bower believed that (as of 1966), American companies were managed more effectively than British ones, chiefly due to a greater sense of competitive urgency in the culture of American companies. A few manifestations of that attitude include:

• Seizing opportunities
• Building on strength, rather than shoring up weaknesses
• Facing problems directly
• Deal with personnel problems - avoid keeping poor performers
• Acting in the present, with the mind to build strength for the long term

All these seem almost self evident. Just like any other work of genius. It is also evident that they run directly opposite of the way most educational establishment are built and the way they function.

Considering, instead of a business-minded company, an educational unit of any size: a national education establishment, a local government educational department, a school, a class-teacher, a parent with a child. We can translate the term of Competitive Urgency with the one of Pedagogic Urgency.

There are opportunities in the form of news items, something a child says or asks, anything that happens outside the expected script. An unseized opportunity is a missed chance to teach something. Many schools and classes function with a sense that everything should be planned, and there must be no surprises. There is much to be said in favor of planning, but overdoing it means overlooking any opportunity.

Focus on strength or weakness was addressed by Peter Drucker when he highlighted a difference between a typical American public school (let's call it a type-G school) that sets out to "help the underprivileged" and a typical private school (let's call it a type-T school) that wishes to "enable those who want to learn, to learn". The former defines itself by failures, the latter - by success. Please note carefully that there is no inherent contradiction between being underprivileged and wanting to learn. An underprivileged kid who wants to learn is interesting to both types of schools. It's just that the type-G school is interested in the kid's problems, and the type-T school is interested in the kid's potential as a learner.

Facing problems: One can easily see that this was written in 1966. These days no one would allow a negative word like "problem" in a discussion. Even "challenge" is a bit too harsh a word. Cynicism aside: Education, or even the simplified version of "schooling" is complex enough to be a breeding ground for many types of problems: A single kid, a whole class, a single teacher, a whole union, a single parent, the whole PTA, finance, new subjects, politics, health and more. It's tempting to try to avoid dealing with the problem; let someone else deal with it on their shift. Guess what: They also tend to just wait until their shift is over.

Personnel problems: Oh dear. There goes the consensus again. It is widely appreciated that an excellent teacher can have a profoundly positive impact on the lives of the students. Similarly, it is common wisdom that a good school principal makes for a much better school, whatever the other circumstances. What about a dexcellent teacher? One who may have once been a good teacher, but is worn out, or one who never should have been a teacher? It is not as pleasant to talk about this, but such a teacher can cause almost-irreversible damage to generations of students. I should know - I had a few of those. What about a bad principal? Their whole school suffers. So, what should "the system" do with under-performers who - even without malice - inflict damage on the lives of the students? Where I come from - the system can do about nothing. A bad teacher will remain a teacher, even if all rungs of management and parents know she (most teachers here are women) has a destructive effect on students. It takes an exceptionally strong principal to be able to dislodge such a teacher, and even then it takes a few years.

Action and Vision: Long-term vision and immediate action in the present, are two poles of effective management. There are very few people who are both visionaries and people-of-action. You can sometimes find them at the head of multi-billion (doesn't matter what currency) business empires they built themselves. Luckily, the education system is inherently made of many people, and is built over generations. Education doesn't require a single person to embody its vision and action. The necessity here is to build an organization where there are always people with vision on all levels, always people of action on all levels, and that they communicate and cooperate.

Bottom line: In order to succeed, education can learn from successful businesses. Like any large organization with complex goals, situated in a changing environment, a certain type of powerful responsiveness determines success. For businesses competing with each other, it has been called "Competitive Urgency." For education establishments striving to prepare children for a constantly changing future, it can be called Pedagogic Urgency.

Critical Mass of Learning

Education is not a form of engineering, and it doesn't need to become one. But it is natural for everybody brings their own background into their thinking about new things. Having grown in the world of engineering, I often find engineering-related terms and insights useful even when thinking about education.

I believe it was Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, a Business-Management and Industrial Engineering thinker, who coined the term BMT for "Bad Multi Tasking." The idea is that when manufacturing anything in a production line, it takes time to change the production line from one product to another. The "setup time" should be considered whenever there is a need to manufacture more than one product or one version of the product. If the factory needs 10 "A-type" products and 10 "B-type" products, it would take less time to manufacture all the A-types first, then all the B-types. It would probably take more time to produce and A-type, then two B-types, then a few more A-types, etc. Every time the production line switches from one type of product to the next, we lose the "setup time." Goldratt took this well known fact from the physical production line to any type of work, including knowledge work. He shows that even if most of the work is done in the mind of the worker, it still takes time to move from one task to another, so we should not do too much "multitasking."

The same concept of BMT works for schooling: Kids switch between activities and subjects every 45-50 minutes. Set-up time and settling-down time takes up a significant proportion of the time. Let's consider two consecutive hours in a school-day:

• 50 minutes history -- WWII
• 10 minutes recess
• 50 minutes literature -- Shakespeare
• 10 minutes recess

How can anyone create or maintain a senses of meaning in the history lesson? Talk with friends about it? Ask the teacher for clarification? Keep it in mind to ask grandpa?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Add to that the fact that often at the beginning of the class it takes some time for the students (and teacher) to settle down and get the relevant material prepared. Add also a possible roll call. Soon enough, the 50-minute class becomes 40 minutes long, producing the following:

• 10 minutes overhead -- settle down
• 40 minutes history -- WWII
• 20 minutes overhead -- recess + settle down
• 40 minutes literature -- Shakespeare
• 10 minutes overhead -- recess

33% of the time is wasted on measurable overhead. It's harder to quantify the mental setup time, and the lack of chance to reflect on the first history lesson.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A possible improvement is to create continuity in the lessons by teaching two consecutive hours of history, and leaving literature for the third hour:

• 10 minutes overhead -- settle down
• 40 minutes history -- WWII
• 10 minutes overhead -- recess (no need to settle down again)
• 50 minutes history -- WWII
• 10 minutes overhead -- recess

25% of the time is wasted on measurable overhead - better than before. And the unquantifiables of mental setup and reflection are doing much better.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We can then build on the previous success, and add the next hour:

• 10 minutes overhead -- settle down
• 40 minutes history -- WWII
• 10 minutes overhead -- recess (no need to settle down again)
• 50 minutes history -- WWII
• 20 minutes overhead -- recess + settle down
• 40 minutes literature -- Joseph Heller's Catch 22 - a novel about WWII
• 10 minutes overhead -- recess

28% of the time is wasted on measurable overhead - slightly worse than when our whole world was history. And the unquantifiables are doing great, with the added bonus of a multidisciplinary view of the same topic: WWII as seen by the historians, and as seen by a satirist. Shakespeare can wait until the history curriculum calls for studying Europe in the 16th century.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are many more ways to add substance to the discussion of a complex issue: Art, Civics, Math, Science etc. We can create a fuller context, with different aspects grabbing the natural attention of different students, and drawing them into the wider scope of the issue at hand - in this example, WWII.

In this post, I mentioned two dimensions along which we can accumulate a mass of learning: Time - consecutive lessons on the same aspect of the same topic, such as history of WWII; and Aspect - adjacent (or at least not far between) lessons on different aspects of the same topic, such as the historical and literary view of the same period. It seems possible that enough discussion from enough angles on a topic will constitute a critical "mass" that makes it easier for students to become concentrated and involved in the subject matter being studied. More research is due.

Learning and Meaning

We humans, like to think we are doing something important. If what we do is important to us, we get emotionally involved, we put effort into it, we see the goal (our goal) beyond the difficulties, so we overcome them. If we consider what we do as unimportant, or meaningless, we may just do it perfunctorily to avoid nagging or punishment. We wouldn't consider it an achievement if we succeeded; We wouldn't mind failing. In this respect, studying is no different than any other occupation: If what we study is meaningful for us, we learn it well, and we know it; If it's meaningless, we will try to do well enough on the test, and forget about it.

Teaching needs to speak to those taught, otherwise learning doesn't occur. This is not my idea - Roland Tharp and others are speaking of it in the 21st century as "Making Meaning." John Dewey spoke about it at the 1890s. King Solomon spoke about it in the book of Proverbs, saying "Teach the boy according to his own way" (22:6) almost 3000 years ago. And if I had meaningful classic history lessons, I would probably know about what Confucius and Aristotle may have said about it.
In the first grade, children learn to read, write and make simple calculations. They find immediate use for these skills, they practice them. It's meaningful. The readers are welcome to ask themselves if they retained that knowledge - can you read, write, add, subtract...? Probably.

In high-school, students learn history, chemistry, trigonometry, etc. They do not have immediate use for this knowledge - apart from the need to pass a test. Usually, they have no idea why they should be studying this issues. It's meaningless. The readers are welcome to ask themselves if they retained that knowledge - can you extract the sine of an angle? Recall the dates of the plague in Europe? Explain why Water is H2O and not H3O? Probably not.

It is not that history, chemistry and trigonometry are inherently more difficult – look at how long it takes a child to master multiplication. It is not that they are inherently unimportant – some aspects of chemistry, such as CO2 emission from burning fossil fuel may be of fatal importance. It is not that they are inherently uninteresting – ask any historian, chemist or mathematician. There is something in the way we teach and learn many subject matters that makes them seem unimportant, uninteresting and difficult.

What is it that we do, that causes this apparent meaninglessness? As usual, the answer - even just the proposed answer - is complex:

• One problem is poor salesmanship - We don't do a very good job selling what we are going to teach; making sure the students want it. This is an issue worthy of its own discussion
  
• Another problem is chopped attention - School students normally skip among several unrelated types of lessons during any given school day: Poetry, History, Math, Gym, Civics, etc. There is no continuity of thought. This issue also deserves its own discussion
  
• A third problem is the lack of emotional involvement: Commitment when beginning to learn something new, and a sense of accomplishment when finishing. A first grader learns to read, and does get a great sense of accomplishment and empowerment - they can read on their own. What does an eight-grader feel they accomplished? Passing a test and knowing they don't need to worry about the Renaissance ever again is a relief, but it's a poor substitute for a sense of empowerment. Yet another discussion looming in the horizon


• There are more interrelated reasons, but this is a good start

If we set out to make every lesson meaningful to the learners, there are many ways open to us: asking them what's interesting to them, showing them the relevance of what they are learning, encouraging them to do something with their new knowledge and skills, and more.
Making every lesson meaningful is possible. But to do that, we have to set this "making meaning" as a primary guideline for the education activity.
.

Primum non nocere - First, do no harm

"First, do no harm." This term is usually used in connection with medicine, and usually attributed to Hippocrates, who may have coined it some 2400 years ago.

More recently - about a year ago, my eldest daughter was about to enter primary school. The school asked the parents what their expectations are of the school. I couldn't think of a better request (prayer?) than "just do no harm."

I don't know much about the young of reptiles, insects and lower animals. Cubs of mammals seem universally curious. Cubs of humans seem - in addition to curiosity - to have great creativity, a brilliant ability to understand new things in ways that surprise the all-knowing grown-ups, and no self-image issues. That is, until they go to school. By the time they graduate, most of them seem sullen, reactive rather than creative, well trained in keeping their heads down and not attracting attention, not terribly curious about learning new things.

At some later point, the lucky ones regain some of their childhood openness.

It is difficult to do no harm in this context, and I have many more questions than answers:

How do you introduce regulation, which is necessary when teaching a large group, without disrupting the free flow of curiosity? It is difficult to teach a class of dozens of students, when one keeps asking questions that are outside the planned flow of the lesson.
We would like the students to develop self-discipline - an important prerequisite for many types of achievement and growth. But how do we promote self-discipline without harming spontaneity?

National education systems have a strong element of testing and grading. As soon as we introduce that element, it tends to become the main goal. "Will this be on the test?" is a common question (48,300 hits on google as of this moment). This is a horrible question. It denotes the unimportant status of learning. All that's important is what the student feels accountable for. The common testing method, where the relevant material and the exact timing of the test is well known in advance, encourages a very specialized type of studying: There is no point in studying what's not on the test; There is no point in reading a whole book if I can read a summary just before the test; There is no point in looking for the relevance of the presented materials to the student's own life - the student's life is not on the test. The whole experience of studying is pushed towards a status of a closed environment, relevant only to itself and to those who may look at the test scores. So, how do we test - which is considered important - without the test itself becoming the be all and end all of schooling?

Some material and activities in school can be expected to be considered an unpleasant burden to some students. In a well thought-out schooling system, there would be different subjects to be taught and different activities to practice. Until we realize Utopian schooling, not all of these subjects will be interesting to all students. Such situations can relate to the regulation and self-discipline issues mentioned above. But more directly, this situation creates a connection between studying, learning and unpleasantness. How do we avoid that? How can we make everything interesting? Alternatively, how can we convey the idea that doing something for a worthy cause, even if it is uninteresting in itself, is worthy of positive emotional involvement? How can we show that the cause is worthy - beyond the whip of the impending test?

In a mass education scenario, the lesson goes at a certain pace, but not all students tend to advance at the same speed. At any given lesson, for some students the pace is too slow and boring, while for others it is too fast and frustrating. How do we keep curiosity and self image unharmed in the presence of boredom and/or frustration? Alternatively, how do we let every student advance in their own pace when we have 40 students in a class? Or even just 20? Any number larger than 1?

We can probably think of more inherent problems in mass education, that harm all who enters. But those listed above are enough. The conclusion is that in general, children going under the education establishment as students - will be harmed. Unsettling; Unnerving; Contemptible, and a whole lot of other words.

Let's put this unpleasant issue aside for a moment, and get back to wrap it up soon. How about "Primum non nocere" in its native context - that of physicians? Going to a physician is usually not a pleasant experience. Being prodded or pricked, or even sawn or partly poisoned, is not much fun. It can be considered as being harmed. But we still go to the physician, in order to keep or improve our health - deriving much more benefit than harm. Actually, a physician not willing to do any harm, is not likely to be able to do much good. So we don't take "First, do no harm" literally. We allow some harm, as long as the benefit is clearly more significant, and as long as we are convinced that there is no reasonable way to receive the benefit without that harm. We do not tolerate unnecessary harm.

The same goes for education. "First, do no harm" is tragically Utopian. "First, do no unnecessary harm" is a worthy goal.