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OurBlook interview with Prof. John Hanes, Regent University School of Education
 Many people in the United States are highly concerned about improving the quality of education. They believe schools are underfunded and students are underperforming, and some have shown their dismay by joining the voucher and charter school movements. What do you think is the state of education in America ... its strengths and weaknesses?
JH: Some strengths include the diversity among the nation’s students, the extended educational possibilities that are available to students who do not complete high school within the conventional time frame, the attention given to at-risk and TESOL students to help improve their chances for success, many dedicated teachers, an increasing emphasis on differentiated instruction, and the permissible multiple approaches to education (traditional public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, private schools, and others) that permit the exploration of various venues for learning.
Weaknesses extend from an overemphasis on episodic high-stakes testing through playing the “blame game” (students, parents, teachers, school boards, administrators, schools of education, accrediting agencies, government, etc., pick one or more, is/are at fault), to shorting funding for gifted programs and failing to analyze effectively the massive amounts of data now available (the DRIP problem – data rich, information poor).
(Editor's note: TESOL means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.)
What are the goals of the educational system, and are they what you think they should be?
JH: The current goals focus on producing students who will make the United States a competitive force internationally as the nation approaches future challenges. We also seek to ensure equality of opportunity and, often, equality of outcome.
While these types of goals have some validity, I would propose that a broader overarching approach might aim to develop students who are sagacious seekers of truth, enveloped by love for learning over the lifespan and for others out of compassion. Reversing this sequence, the goal set would emphasize caritas, veritas, and sapientia. Extending this goal set to passion for things intellectual, a sense of individual and group purpose, and deliberate perseverance helps equip students for a seemingly unpredictable future. Perseverance has special value in the context of conation because schools have tended to focus on the motivational side rather than the volitional aspect. Helping students approach an “iron will” in the academic realm increases their probability for success as adults.
How has the major school reform movement ... No Child Left Behind ... impacted either positively or negatively the educational system? Should it be continued or scrapped? Are there any improvements that could be made?
JH: From the positive side, states have had to render attention to previously marginalized groups of students who must be addressed as separate entities in the assessment of annual yearly progress (AYP).
Negative impacts include: the aforementioned overemphasis on episodic high-stakes testing; the proliferation of standards to the point of scripting a teacher’s day in enormous detail; and the cheating, postponement of standard implementation, and degradation of testing that have accompanied educators’ struggles to attain AYP.
Rather than “throw the baby out with the bath water,” we might want to reduce to some degree NCLB’s pervasive influence on our nation’s educational enterprise. For instance, how about valuing the AYP indicators somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of a school’s merit and then allowing school districts to embrace and assess other goals for the remainder? Another suggestion follows the value-added, growth curve analysis already underway for a number of states under NCLB. We really should be quite interested in the progress that a student makes each year regardless of a current achievement level (presumably, if the cognitive improvement is optimized as much as possible for an individual student, then that student’s measured competence is as good as it can be, and no amount of standard-setting can change that).
Your school was ranked second in the nation for online schools by one guide. What contributed to this performance, and can technology such as studying online make a significant difference, and why? Is it better for some children or most children or all children? Are there any disadvantages?
JH: Regent’s performance in online education stems from a number of factors that probably behave synergistically. First, the university looks to God for guidance in all matters. Second, the school has a technology heritage, driven by its presidents from the top and executed by focused academic administrators including the deans of the various graduate schools and the undergraduate program. Third, early adoption of the Blackboard course management system and Smart stations gave both online and on-campus arenas an established tradition of engagement with pedagogically facilitating technology. Fourth, this has been maintained and enhanced by a strong, forward-looking Information Technology (IT) department and the Center for Teaching and Learning, a unit that provides training and one-on-one assistance for faculty, staff and students (this includes regularly scheduled courses for Blackboard, the Quality Matters rubric, Wimba, Camtasia, and the Microsoft Office suite, along with semi-annual luncheons where faculty and staff present their technology applications and innovations). The IT help-desk efficiently tracks and solves Internet user issues. Library support via the Internet, phone and in-person provides further aid for students involved in research.
Fifth, technology coordinators for each school also work with faculty and students to solve problems and offer suitable training where needed. In the School of Education, the coordinator runs monthly technology sessions for the faculty and is always available for individual consultation. Sixth, coming from a Christian orientation, the faculty members generally establish a personal relationship with their online students through mutual prayer for special needs via dedicated Blackboard discussion forums. Although we maintain challenging standards, most of us treat our students with great respect and care, as if they were close family members.
Lastly, the students themselves, because of their diverse backgrounds, contribute significantly to online discussions and group assignments. Generally, several of the six habitable continents are represented by current residents in the online Masters class that I have taught over a number of semesters. The broadened perspectives are invaluable.
As in most things, there are tradeoffs that deserve exploration when it comes to generalizing the effects of technology on education. For online study in particular, obvious benefits flow to those who, for various reasons (health, finances, transportation, and others), cannot attend classes on campus. Offering asynchronous scheduling of scholarly interaction broadens the potential student base, and synchronous opportunities are still available via modalities such as Wimba.
There is some loss of spontaneity, and it may be argued that students and faculty do not develop the presumably closer relationships available in the face-to-face classroom. Issues of proper assessment are magnified online because an instructor may have greater doubts concerning who is actually responding to a test and how the test has been treated technologically in terms of embedded calculations and answers.
As far as applicability to all students, online learning is becoming increasingly available for most students as states such as Florida develop entire K-12 curricula online and higher education converts many courses for online viewing, if not full credit. MIT’s panoply of courses online includes syllabi, video lectures, assignments, labs and examinations, often with suggested answers. Some prognosticators forecast that by 2020, at least half of all high school courses will be online. In this evolving situation, almost all students will be online learners regardless of their personal proclivities, and younger individuals have simply been subsumed by one “online” culture or another by the time they are enrolled in elementary, or certainly middle and high, school.
Our challenge in the field of education is to combine the best of traditional and online capabilities for all students. Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course in video format is currently running on PBS, and the peripheral discussion groups that have sprung from this master educator’s on campus interactive lectures suggest some directions for online courses propelled by such outstanding talent. What would an online version of such a course look like? Would it be possible for 10,000 students to take the course simultaneously for credit (an expansion of the roughly 1,100 students in an on-campus semester)? How about 20,000? What is the limit? Would students from other universities be able to receive credit for the course? Eventually, would a small subset of “star” professors come to dominate course offerings, and would a university transcript become a mosaic of variously sourced courses? What if such a model was moved to the high school or even lowers levels of instruction? Finally, what if many of our “tool” courses could be effectively carried by a computer program, sans professor/teacher (and even without lectures and labs), as Carnegie Mellon’s Open University Initiative has demonstrated?
Educationally, how does the United States compare to other countries? What methods and conceptual concerns from other countries could the U.S. incorporate into its educational models?
JH: This depends on who you ask. Critics and defenders abound. The results from the TIMSS, PISA and NAEP tests are interpreted variously, but I would venture that the United States has not generated a stellar performance over the past several decades, particularly within the older, high school age group, when compared to a number of the OECD nations.
We in the United States are still contesting the best methods for teaching reading and mathematics (the reading and math “wars”). Many nations have a structured curriculum mandated by a central authority, and this tends to stabilize learning for all students. Regardless of comparative effectiveness, this stability has intrinsic value in its own right. On the other hand, our competing paradigms may have the benefit of offering a rather coarse differentiated instruction that can accommodate a broader range of cognitive needs.
The citizens of many other nations hold their K-12 teachers in high esteem, and we may need to foster such feelings via requiring a degree in a field other than education as part of the licensing process in this country. Teachers need to be an expert in some subject area that hopefully involves one of the topics they are teaching.
Most other nations require one or more foreign languages as an accepted part of their curriculum. Even though English is becoming a kind of Esperanto for the 21st century, we need a stronger exposure for our students among various languages, perhaps in generalized format. As an example, some experience with a pictograph based language, like Chinese, might be helpful for broadening both cultural knowledge and cognitive functioning (the “white men can’t contextualize” issue).
How might social media and ever-changing technology improve classrooms and the learning environment for teachers and students? How might they be impeding the educational process?
JH: Students utilizing social media and ever-changing technology are both helping to create 21st century skills and mastering them at the same time. As usual, there are tradeoffs here that need some attention. These 21st century skills include communication, collaboration, information technology, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, active engagement and technological competence. The emphasis is often on process or skills over content knowledge, and multitasking becomes a practical necessity. Concern emanates from those, like Daniel Willingham and E. D. Hirsch, who feel that “thinking skills are intertwined with domain knowledge.” Work by Patricia Greenfield and others at UCLA has raised concerns for the efficiency and effectiveness of multitasking in terms of some essential cognitive processes.
The educational enterprise needs to direct students’ engagement with both the content knowledge and the skills aspects of learning. I really want my neurosurgeon or airplane pilot to employ, in a crisis, both vast knowledge and multitasking, 21st century skills toward making sound decisions as an individual and collaborator discerning truth in a time constrained scenario. I will not be thus concerned for an inventor in a garage or a scholar writing a book on medieval history in southern France. However, their efforts might well be similarly enhanced by a combination of knowledge and skills.
About the future of education in the U.S. ... will it get better or worse?
JH: Constrained financial funding may diminish significant improvement in the short (and even possibly long) term. However, as results from the TIMSS and NAEP testing indicate, there may be some momentum from our elementary and middle school grades that begins to effect improved scoring for our high school and college students. There will always be pockets of progress and stagnation, and the educator’s responsibility requires a focus on using the former to inform the latter. As an aside, columnists, such as Jay Matthews of the Washington Post provide some helpful insights into the evolving state of American education on a regular basis.
Is there anything else you'd like to say about any aspect of this topic?
JH: Per some input from Harry Sova in our School of Communications, I would like to extend the technological thinking for education a bit into the future, although not far. With the growth of cloud computing, faster nanosecond or greater response rates as the Grid replaces the Web, exabytes to zetabytes of stored knowledge, proliferating information gathering sensors in clothing and personal equipment, constant Internet connection, the semantic web/grid for better retrieval, retinal projection lenses, personal agents spawned by genetic algorithms, improvements in augmented and virtual reality, and increasingly sophisticated decision engines like Wolfram alpha (and possibly Bing and Hunch types), the field of education may need to re-think the nature of the knowledge and skills that we teach.
Consider the following scenario:
You and I are engaged in a conversation about a PBS show on the Napoleonic Wars. I really “know” very little about this topic, but my sensors have communicated the details of your speech to the cloud where my agents mobilize a response based upon my usual focus in historical matters. Almost instantaneously, the retrieval process relays a Bing-Wikipedia presentation to my retina, and I make the following statement: “You know, I have always wondered what moved Marshal Ney to attack the Prussian front at the battle of Jena in October of 1806. He had no such orders from the Emperor, and he nearly delivered a great loss to the French army. Did the program explore this situation in any detail?”
If you have no real understanding of the technology involved here, then you might assume that I am well acquainted with Napoleon’s campaigns and possibly a history major. I can even reveal some of the technical aspects of my abilities by using my cell phone or necklace device with projection and gestural interface, a la Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense (from Pattie Maes’ MIT lab), in order to replay and manipulate the important aspects of the battle in 2- or 3-space. In essence, the digital world is an extension of my brain for both knowledge and skills (of which robots performing surgery are just one example). If everything that I focus my eyes upon is labeled, and even defined and explained, by augmented reality (think of the Fringe television graphics on steroids), then what do I need to learn in terms of formal schooling? “Just in time education” is challenging the educational enterprise to probe its foundations and future.
(John Hanes is assistant professor of educational research at Regent’s School of Education. He earned a B.A. from Brown University, an M.B.A. from Wake Forest and a Ph.D. in educational research from the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) where he was awarded the outstanding dissertation for 2000-2001.)
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