by Todd Rose
I have also learned to use technology to protect me against some of the risks posed by technology. Having recognized that my extraordinary love of novelty puts me at risk of going off on endless Google-powered information-hunting expeditions, even as work deadlines fly past, I’ve programmed my desktop’s browser to raise a flag after I’ve spent fifteen minutes surfing. It’s just as likely that I’ll ignore as heed that flag, but I like having the opportunity to choose whether I will keep surfing or get back to work. For people who need even more help, there are now computer programs that shut off your access to e-mail and the Internet for blocks of time, unless you reboot your computer.
To help me stay on track with errands and projects, I rely on an organizational system based on insights from one of my favorite books—Getting Things Done—written by the productivity guru David Allen. I implement my organizational system with a software program that organizes my projects and tasks and reminds me of approaching deadlines. One big advantage of this kind of organizational system is that it has taught me how to break down big projects into much less overwhelming tasks. I have trained myself to set aside the first fifteen minutes of every morning to make sure my system is on track, and I usually dedicate an hour on Sundays to updating it.
In all these ways and more, I “offload” demands and automate mundane tasks, making them manageable and in the process freeing up my working memory for more meaningful work. The benefits have extended far beyond increasing my productivity. Once I created a system I trusted to help me manage my open loops, my stress level dropped considerably and I found it much easier to sleep at night. As our information culture inexorably gets more demanding, and the options for where to focus our attention explode, I predict many people with supposedly excellent working memory will have to rely on similar systems.
Positive Feedback Loops
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As my strategies and tools have helped me get more done, my self-confidence has improved, and I’ve been able to achieve even more. I got my doctorate from Harvard in 2007, and tried not to mind that instead of a diploma at the graduation ceremony, I was given a notice reminding me that I owed the university another $6,500. (I got the diploma once I paid that bill.) I went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and I am now a faculty member at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Today I have the privilege of collaborating with an extraordinary group of colleagues from throughout the world. To be sure, I’m still paying off what at last count was $180,000 in student loans (and which, of course, was worth every penny). Meanwhile, I often reminisce with my mother, who, with all of her five kids now more or less off on their own, is indulging her own restless nature as never before, plotting overseas adventures that liven up her routine of a three-day-a-week nursing job combined with taking care of her own aging mom and her grandkids. Once or twice a year, she goes on missions with Operation Smile, which sponsors reconstructive surgeries for underprivileged children. So far she has traveled to India, China, Thailand, Ecuador, and the Philippines. “I try to enjoy each stage of life, but I must admit this one is pretty great,” she says. She applauds my successes but has often teased me about what she has called the injustice of the fact that my two sons, now teenagers, have been models of good behavior. (If she only knew!)
My life’s peaks and valleys, and the wisdom that my parents and all my other generous mentors so skillfully helped me gain, continue to inform my professional work, which focuses on reimagining learning through the lens of complex systems. There are mornings on which I’ll awake from dreams of being back in middle school, once again as the pitiable square peg doing the Devil’s work of challenging authority, and need to remind myself that I am now the witty lecturer who spurs innovation by questioning conventional assumptions. Each time I consider this contrast, I marvel anew at the power of context.
Because, after all, I’m still the same person.
BIG IDEAS
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary accepts either syllabi or syllabuses as the plural of “syllabus.”
Failing well—that is, staying calm through adversity and recognizing what can be learned from mistakes—is a foundation of success in a variety of fields.
Penicillin, Popsicles, the microwave, and superglue were all discovered by accident.
Many scientific experiments fail—but the greater risk is that the value of many of those failures is ignored.
To learn from mistakes takes an unusual level of mental capacity and effort. The emotional experience of failure can swamp the brain in stress hormones and interfere with clear thinking.
In the information age, we all need a system to expand our working memory.
ACTION ITEMS
Develop your own system to extend your natural cognitive abilities and to help you stay organized and productive. I suggest you start by testing existing approaches, such as those recommended in Getting Things Done, and see what works (and what doesn’t) for your particular kind of variability. Teach your kids to follow suit.
By the way, among the specific technologies I’ve found helpful to increase my productivity are:
“Things,” a Mac task management system that helps me prioritize my goals and break down big jobs into little ones; it also keeps track of pending errands.
A similar task management tool called “OmniFocus” goes one step further, reminding me of chores I need to do whenever it is convenient to do them. For instance, if I need to mail a letter, the program will make my smartphone vibrate to alert me if I’m within three miles of a post office.
“Freedom,” a downloadable software program, shuts off your access to e-mail and the Internet for a designated time, letting you sustain attention to a task at hand.
EPILOGUE
Creating New Contexts for Learning
“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”
—John Dewey
Education Gets Personal
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A couple of years ago, I watched a child’s future change course, all because of a new digital software program.
I was visiting a fourth-grade public school science class with two of my colleagues, field-testing the Internet-based science notebook I first mentioned in chapter 8. A few minutes after the teacher introduced us, she called our attention to a gangly, quiet boy named Dan, who had been diagnosed with dyslexia. Dan had been struggling in all of his classes, which was all the more the pity, said his teacher, since she had noticed that he had what she called “a scientist’s mind.” Inquisitive, imaginative, and persistent, he was nonetheless stalled at the classroom’s starting gate by his troubles with reading and organizing his thoughts. If his school career continued like this for much longer, it was hard to imagine him enduring for many more years. What’s more, it was a good bet that Dan wasn’t the only square peg in that class—there may well have been one or two or several other potential science stars in danger of getting left behind by the teach-to-the-middle constraints.
The technology that we developed for Dan’s class helped him—and his fellow students—in several important ways. Among other things, it came with a built-in, text-to-speech feature, as well as headphones, offering the option of listening to the text instead of reading it. Dan and his classmates could also see material represented in a variety of ways, with pictures, videos, and graphs all raising the chances of information sinking in. Similarly, the program offered students multiple ways of demonstrating what they had learned. Rather than relying strictly on handwritten notes, anyone who chose to could type, draw, create audio recordings, or upload images and diagrams. Not least, shy students—including Dan—could now communicate directly with their teacher via an e-mail program embedded in the software, giving these learners a channel for timely feedback, while sparing them the embarrassment of needing to raise their hands continually during class.
Dan adapted quickly to the new system and within a few weeks, as hi
s teacher happily informed us, he seemed like a different kid. Her insight proved true: He had a natural aptitude for science, which he could now finally demonstrate. His confidence grew with each new achievement, and he soon became the go-to guy for other students who had questions it seemed that only Dan could answer.
I can’t think of a better example of Aristotle’s principle of “unimpeded excellence” than the story of Dan with his science notebook. It strikes me as the perfect harbinger of a new, technology-enabled approach to education, one capable of vastly improving the lives of millions of currently frustrated children, parents, and teachers. It’s important to remember, however, that it wasn’t just the software that changed Dan’s classroom experience, but a new way of looking at kids like him, within schools and in families, with a new appreciation for the hidden gems these square pegs have to offer.
You know all about my narrow escape from both conventional schooling and a lifelong alienation from learning. My aim now is to give you a glimpse of the kinds of projects being launched today—including some in which I’m personally involved—which I believe offer hope for similarly imperiled bright young minds.
We’re living at a moment of unprecedented opportunity in American education, brought to us by a convergence of two dramatic trends—technological innovation and economic necessity. Seizing this moment as it deserves would mean reinventing education as we’ve known it for much too long, creating new contexts in which schools become places of rigor, relevance, and promise for all students. The danger, of course, is that this very same convergence could just as easily lead to a dismal situation in which warm-blooded mentors are replaced with computers, and school becomes more rather than less like factories.
I’ll tell you more about that danger as well. But for the moment, let’s get back to Dan, and his high-tech science notebook.
The software’s arrival could not have been timelier for Dan and his classmates, who to one degree or another were all trying to match a unique array of strengths and weaknesses to a cookie-cutter education delivery model. Along with fourth graders throughout the United States, the class we visited was just beginning to study science in a serious way: observing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, drawing conclusions, and writing up reports. That’s a daunting set of high-order thinking demands for most students, and too often, it’s simply beyond the grasp of kids who are already falling behind.
The notebook is a particularly ambitious example of technology that frees students from the trap of conventional educational contexts that ignore natural learning variability. For students with poor working memory (like me), for instance, it offers “just-in-time” instructions as these learners complete their tasks, so they aren’t overwhelmed by trying to remember every step. When they sit down to write up their results, they get reminders about how to proceed, with tips, for example, on what a good first sentence should include. Children who have trouble staying organized can rely on to-do lists, which break down projects into small pieces, giving them valuable practice in a key skill. Students who are still learning English can mouse-click on unfamiliar words to have them defined.
My colleagues have since tested this device with hundreds of kids in urban, low-income schools and have confirmed that it improves academic performance. It’s no wonder that my friend Tim Blair, a San Francisco college student who struggled all the way through grade school—much like I did—compares these new technologies to Batman’s secret weapon: his high-tech utility belt. “It makes no difference that Batman doesn’t have any superpowers,” Blair says, “as long as he’s got that belt.” While I like that analogy, I also have a more prosaic image of the notebook: a bulldozer removing obstacles in the wake of superpowers kids already have.
Blair, who talks nearly as fast as I do, and whose wiry build and frizzy hair reminds me of the cartoon character Sideshow Bob, on The Simpsons, knows what he’s talking about. Diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten, he switched schools five times before his senior year in high school, mostly due to discipline and social problems, and eventually became an advocate for other kids like him, through a San Francisco–based group called SAFE Voices. One of his earliest memories of school is being sent, in tears, to the principal’s office in third grade because he wouldn’t show his math work. “Teachers used to tell me I was going to prison,” Blair recalls today. “Not that I would go if I kept up some behavior, but that I was going.” The right high-tech support, as well as a lot more understanding from humans, might have prevented some of that misery, Blair says, although he adds that the tool he’s really waiting for is a “remote control device that could fast-forward, rewind, or eject your teacher.”
Education reformers refer to the magic that inspires Tim Blair and that brought out the scientist in Dan as personalization—by which they mean a quest to use the power of digital technologies to transform our current cookie-cutter curriculum to meet the needs of many more students. At this writing, the increasing adoption of digital technology is clearing the way for similar miracles in thousands of schools throughout the nation, ushering in a long-overdue revolution. In fact, it’s all happening at such an accelerating rate that I’d give the printed textbook another five years of life at best.
Now I like speed as well as the next guy born with an extremely low tolerance for boredom, but in this case we need to move forward thoughtfully. Economic necessity can be a powerful motivator for doing the hard work necessary to produce meaningful and lasting change; it can also be an excuse for taking shortcuts, such as giving the number crunchers leeway to cut costs by trying to automate education, laying off teachers even as they invest in computers. This trend might easily lead to a state of affairs in which, in the words of education historian Diane Ravitch, “the poor will get computers [and] the rich will get computers and teachers.”
We simply can’t let that happen, given all that we know now, including, I hope, what you’ve learned from this book about the power of complex systems in human behavior. I’m referring here specifically to the impact of emotions and context and the power of feedback loops when it comes to learning, including the transformative potential of adult mentors in the lives of square-peg students. Nonetheless, we can’t let our fears delay us from offering utility belts (or bulldozers) to kids like Dan and Tim—not the least because, whether we like it or not, the wiring of U.S. schools is inevitable.
Learning Unleashed
* * *
U.S. classrooms have been plugging into new educational technology at a dizzying rate. Strategies that began in a limited way mostly to help homeschoolers are rapidly becoming mainstream classroom staples. In the decade beginning with the year 2000, the number of K–12-grade students taking an online course shot up from 45,000 to 4 million. At this writing, more than half a million grade school students now attend online schools full time.
As I’ve visited schools throughout the United States in recent years, I’ve been delighted to discover many ways in which this digital wave in education, combined—and this is key—with new understanding about the variability in how people learn, has been liberating students like Dan and Tim Blair from the miseries of educational contexts that ignore their variability. Already, thousands of U.S. schools have been incorporating cutting-edge tools to customize instruction in ways that help students embrace learning as never before. Many of them are claiming significant progress in student achievement, without spending any more, or even at reduced cost. What I find especially exciting about this trend is that the progress hasn’t been limited to private or charter schools; it has been slowly influencing many mainstream public schools as well. One reason for this is the new economic reality of education, in which public school districts are essentially being forced to modernize, as they pare their budgets.
That budget pressure helps explain why one of the boldest experiments to date at this writing, a pilot project known as the School of One, was born in the New York public school system. The pioneering program is intended not only to mak
e school a lot more engaging and helpful for all kinds of students, but also, eventually, to save money on books, paper, and personnel.
With the help of a sophisticated computerized system, School of One students follow individualized lesson plans, which are produced each day anew, based on what and how these learners did the day before. Each morning, the children report to a wall of computer monitors that resemble an airport’s arrival and departure screens, where they learn their daily schedules. Depending on their ability to move forward, or their need to review, they then proceed either to hands-on group activities, computer sessions, or individual instruction. Kids learn at their own paces, and, ideally, in ways that suit each of them best. No one gets held back or pushed forward.
While it’s still too early to assume that the School of One model is the wave of the future for U.S. education, it’s hard to ignore its achievements when it comes to standardized tests. In 2009, a School of One pilot project reported that it had raised middle school students’ scores by 28 percent, a remarkably rare impact. And elsewhere in the country, other tech-heavy experiments are reporting similar rates of success, particularly with students in low-income communities. In San Jose, California, a small charter school network called Rocketship Education, founded in 2007, has quickly risen to become one of California’s top-performing schools for students living in poverty. And in Colorado, DSST Public Schools, a charter named for its flagship, the Denver School of Science and Technology, claims similar wonders with low-income students, reporting that every single one of its graduates has been accepted to four-year colleges.