Research: Smaller tasks, more often

Brain research shows that permanent learning only takes place when research activities are assigned frequently enough that students can exercise and develop the essential skills of critical reading, writing, higher-order thinking, and presenting ideas and opinions with a purpose.

Brain research also shows that these activities must be related to student interests about their world and provide the opportunity for them to develop their own “reasoned opinions” based on researched facts and expert opinions. This desired learning is impossible to do for all students when schools depend on the “term paper” as their only research strategy.

A recent study of Social Studies teachers indicates that the age of the term paper is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by shorter and more frequent types of mini-research. Education Week – November 20, 2002.

We too often think of information problem-solving in the context of huge projects or term papers, when most of us in both our work and personal lives use information problem-solving skills everyday. How can we give our student’s everyday practice with information literacy skills? Some suggestions are below.

1. Use the Internet to check the weather forecast and make a recommendation about dress for the next day.
2. Search and report an interesting fact about the author of the next story being read by the class.
3. Email students in another class to ask their opinions on a discussion topic.
4. Recommend a movie or television show to watch the coming weekend.
5. Find two science articles that relate to the current science unit. Evaluate the credibility of the sources of information.
6. Locate a place from a current news headline on an online map resource like <www.mapquest.com>.
7. Recommend a book to a classmate based on other books that classmate has read using the school’s library catalog or an Internet source.
8. Update the class webpage with interesting facts from units studied and links to related information on the web.
9. Estimate the number of calories and fat grams in the meal served in the cafeteria that day.
10. Find a “quote of the day” on a specific topic and use a graphics program to illustrate and print it out. (from Everyday Problem-Solving, Sept 2002)

My sense is that most teachers could easily create a "information task of the day" type activitity - or the librarian could supply one to the entire school for the daily bulletin. We don't rely on big "reading" projects or "math" projects or "writing" projects to teach these essential skills. Why do we rely on big "research" projects to teach those essential skills?

Think small. Think more often. Think real life questions.

A folder mind-set in a tagging world

Johnson's Law of Searching:
It's easier to find something than to find it again.

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. - Wikipedia

Doug Jamison at Geezer's online wrote about the impact of search engines on traditional organizational structures in his Front Page for Everything entry:

The personal computer and online databases started the erosion, then Gopher, Archie, BBS's, usenet, and the web. But the search engine was the giant killer. It made all previous information-organizing structures seem cumbersome and restrictive.

The entry struck a nerve with me - and not just because I too am a geezer. I am in the process of shifting from using the folder and subfolder organizational struture of Outlook/Entourage to the tagging system of Gmail for tracking my saved e-mails.

And I am nervous.

I'm not sure why I should be other than the fact that for 10 years or so I have lived and died on the ability to retrieve specific e-mails using a filing system. E-mails that contained things like ike flight reservations. Like price quotes. Like writing deadlines. Little things like that.

And I've taught people how to organize their own files using folders and subfolders for as long as I have been teaching teachers how to use Macs. I used to bring in real file folders as visual aids in workshops. (Just like in your real file cabinet, your hard drive can hold folders. And you can put a folder inside another folder. Everything does NOT have to stay on your desktop.)

Now, whenever I see a computer desktop that looks like this on a teacher's machine in our district, I consider it a personal failure:

Have the "dump everything in one place" people been the smart ones? Due to tagging and full-text searching using OSX's Spotlight, Google, and other powerful indexing/search tools, I seem to have been wasting my time and effort carefully filing my documents - and teaching others to categorize and sort as well.

Shudder.

It's now a simple matter to save everything in a "Documents" folder morass and then use the Genie of the Find Command to quickly summon just those works with key tags or phrases. Easier and more effective, I admit, than trying to remember the name of folders and subfolders and documents.

But I can't help but think that we are losing a something as well - the ability to think in terms of categories and hierarchies and abstraction ladders ala S.I. Hayakawa. Knowing how to move up and down the abstraction ladder easily:  Living things -> animals -> birds -> penguins -> Tacky.

from Language in Thought and Action, by S.I. Hayakawa

Tagging and full-text searching seem just one small example of technology relieving us of the need to think for ourselves, to come up with ways of organizing our thoughts and our world. Of exercising our gray matter a bit.

Or maybe such a thought is simply my geezer-itis flaring up.

Are they really "21st century" skills?

In the Bridging Differences blog, Diane Ravitch writes:

... the movement for “21st Century skills” sounds similar—if not identical—to earlier movements over the past century. Its calls to teach critical thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving, and cooperative group skills are not at all “21st Century.” Certainly for the past generation, these goals have been virtual mantras in our schools of education. If there is anything that teachers have been taught over the years, it is the importance of pursuing these goals, which are certainly laudable in themselves.

Earlier manifestations of the movement to teach outcomes directly was referred to as “life adjustment education,” or “outcome-based education,” or most recently in the 1990s, “SCANS skills.” In every manifestation, the movement says that we should teach students how to think and teach them real-life skills but downplay academic subjects because students can always look up “bits of information.”

and adds...

Is it [the 21st Century Skills movement] an effort on the part of the technology companies to sell more high-tech hardware and software to schools? Is it an effort to throw a wrench into the effort to develop meaningful and reasonable academic standards by replacing them with vague and pleasing-sounding goals?

Read Ravich's column for a reality check. The blogosphere has rightly been called an echo-chamber of like-minded commentators who reinforce each other's beliefs with few other voices offering divergent opinions. (Tribes?)

So why, if "21st century skills" have been promoted for the past 30 years have they not risen to level of importance of the basic 3rs? Why is NCLB not demanding that schools unable to demonstrate that they are teaching critical thinking be placed on AYP?

I have always been skeptical that society or schools actually want students who are capable of critical thinking. Who are information literate. Who are genuinely creative. These scary people threaten the status quo and may lead a better class of legislators, CEOs, and school administrators. See "Why Robots Make the Best Students" and "The Illusion of Change."

I am also beginning to think that both ISTE, AASL, and other organizations who promote "21st Century skills" have done a disservice to students by their very ambition attempts to incorporate all the skills today's kids need in their documents. Rather than a modest list of well-defined and achievable skills written in a language the general education community and public can understand, we are now working with "vague and pleasing-sounding goals."

OK, call me a geezer, but I still like "research skills" and "computer skills." I suspect teachers who encourage creativity, expect higher-level thinking skills, collaboration, and all these fuzzy  "dispositions" will do so even if they aren't spelled out in standards - or continue to ignore them if they are is so inclined.