Translator: Napakcha P. Reviewer: Robert Tucker
In my 37 years as an educator,
I have heard thousands of questions, thousands.
But there's one question asked every day, millions of times,
and it's almost always answered badly.
Every day, 55 million Americans go to school,
and, when they come home,
the majority of them are asked by a loving parent:
"How was school today?"
(Laughter)
Now, before my two boys went to college,
I estimate that I asked that question 5,096 times
with terrible responses.
And in fact, I've summarized them for you.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Love my boys.
So why, why do we keep asking this question
knowing there's little likelihood
of getting any kind of satisfactory response?
Well, I'd like you to meet my grandnephew, Kelly Brisk.
Oh yeah! Ah, ah, ah -
(Laughter)
Five minutes with Kelly will tell you
everything you want to know about love of learning.
He's an artist, explorer, disruptor,
and while he's doing those things,
he's learning to speak English,
he's learning to walk straight,
and he's learning to keep his pants on.
(Laughter)
He, and every two-year-old I've ever met, is the embodiment of love of learning.
And I want to tell you a little.
We knew that there were problems starting
long time ago.
It was a generation ago, in 1983,
when the National Council on Excellence in Education
put forward their report "A Nation at Risk,"
which said terrible things about education,
terrible things about education.
My favorite terrible thing that it said was:
If a hostile power had tried to impose upon America
it's mediocre educational performance,
we might have considered it an act of war.
Heavy stuff.
But "A Nation at Risk" also was a document about love of learning,
and one of its most important proposals was
that we steer away from minimum competency testing,
and that, instead, we work to focus, to stretch,
every mind to its full potential.
And what did we do with that recommendation?
We entirely ignored it
and ran for an embrace of high-stakes standardized testing
as the only measure acceptable in terms of success in education.
And the results have been pretty clear:
our standardized testing scores haven't done very well since then.
We've seen scandals,
we've seen parental protests,
we've seen huge expenditures of money,
and we've seen wild legislative flips from one extreme to the other.
It's been a terrifying show
of what happens when you commit to this kind of work.
And as one of the members of the State of Ohio said
when asked about why we go to standardized testing
instead of love of learning,
"How important can love of learning be if you can't measure it?"
Well, we can and we do measure it:
before you earn 9,000 data points
from my school from the 2015-16 school year,
representing every student in every grade
from grades 5 through 12.
And I want to talk to you a little about how we do this.
First, when we talk about love of learning,
the term we're actually measuring is student engagement.
And student engagement exists
when two phenomena happen at the same time.
First, students to be engaged have to be challenged.
So, we look for high challenge in student engagement.
And at the same time they're being challenged,
they should love it.
Seems simple, doesn't it?
And that students who have both of those phenomena at the same time,
we say are engaged.
Students who are challenged and hate it,
that's a phenomenon we refer to as "the grind."
Students who hate it and are unchallenged
are quite simply bored.
And finally, students who are unchallenged and love it,
we call that entertained.
(Laughter)
I want you to do something now.
I want you to think back to the time you were in high school.
Can you do that? It might be painful for some of you.
Okay, so, back to high school.
Now, I want you to think about a class that was really memorable,
good or bad.
Got one?
With me?
Okay. Now, where would you put it on this grid?
Do you have any trouble putting it on this grid?
Now, for me, it's really easy,
and high school for me was a really long time ago.
But when I think of my senior year,
my senior Latin class tested me to the utmost, and I loved it.
Economics, in the same year, not so much.
No surprise that when I went to college I majored in Classics,
and I took one economics class, and I failed the midterm.
Now, if I can remember those things 40 years since,
we believe that students who are actually in those classes at that time
can be asked to give us critical analysis of the experience they're having.
After all, they are the experts
on whether they feel challenged and whether they love it.
So, what we do is,
three times a year, we ask students to get a list of their classes,
and they place them in the appropriate grid.
And we get searchable data in all sorts of ways.
We can get a variety of classes.
And here you can see a comparison between two classes,
two different teachers, but the same students.
As we reflect on this,
we can see, when we look at teacher No. 2’s constellation of dots,
that her students are telling her
that she is not sufficiently challenging them.
And that is powerful data for a teacher.
I want to talk a little bit also about -
because this is live data,
we can drill down and look at individual students.
So, we have many students
that, we are delighted to say, say they're incredibly engaged.
This 11th grade girl is a straight-A student,
but we can know from this constellation
that she's got a problem in biology class even though she's getting an A.
And before a student is a disciplinary problem, or drops out,
we might know that this 10th-grade boy is overwhelmed,
or this 9th-grade girl we may have lost.
So, what do we do with all of this?
This really requires us to think differently
about the way we work.
When you're subject to standardized testing,
students are essentially treated as experimental subjects.
They're lab rats.
There's one particular path to go,
you get to the cheese,
and the cheese in this case is a diploma when the testing is high stakes.
There's really no choice in it.
There's really hardly any value
to the standardized testing for the student
except to get the cheesy diploma.
We think of students differently.
We think of students as partners,
because nobody, nobody, benefits more from increased engagement
than the students.
So, we work with the students in a protocol
to try to understand from them what puts them in the engaged quadrant.
And I'd like to share with you
three quick things that we've uncovered in that work.
First, students tell us
that when they connect with the teacher, they're more likely to be engaged.
This has opened up work for us
in coaching teachers who don't connect well with students.
Secondly, we learned from our students
that mobility is an important component in engagement.
And with this insight,
we have started to replace our clunky big desks that are hard to move
with rolling tables, chairs and whiteboards
that can be easily configured by teachers and students
for different purposes.
And finally, and maybe most importantly,
we find out from our students
that autonomy, their ability to make key decisions in the work that they do,
is probably the greatest contributor to engagement.
And with this insight,
we fund our teachers to work on new pedagogies
and new ways of running their classes
that increase student ability to make decisions
about the directions of their study.
So, you might think now about standardized testing:
In standardized testing,
there is never any connection, no mobility and no autonomy.
So, this is the part of the talk now
where I'm supposed to give you a replacement question
for "How was school today?"
that is going to make your child speak to you for 30 or 40 minutes
(Laughter)
in blank verse and rapture.
Well, for those of you who have teenagers, or those of you who've had teenagers,
you know that's not going to happen,
whatever you do, you'll get the unintelligible grunt.
Am I right?
Yes, indeed.
But, I do think it's vital and important
that when we are talking with our children,
when we are talking with our children's teachers,
school leaders, legislators,
and when our students are talking with all of those people,
that we tell them that student engagement, that love of learning,
is our highest priority.
And, by the way, who in his right mind would argue against love of learning.
Thank you.
(Applause)