Born On Dating or as my son would say, BANANA!

About 5 years ago, Budweiser started a campaign regarding the freshness of beer. The commercial focused on the fresher the beer the better the taste. By grouping certain bottles together, you would be more likely to get a bottle that was ready to be tasted. I would assume by the lack of companies that followed this advertising trend that people realized your beer is not a banana. There is no small window in which it is ripe than turns sour. Most often beer is bottled and ready to be consumed when we are ready to partake.

Since we moved from the one room school house to the current framework of learning, we have transitioned from helping kids learn skills & competencies they were ready for to our own version of born on dating. As Sir Ken Robinson points out in his Changing Educational Paradigms video, we use a factory model to put children through learning challenges as if they were bottles of beer or a collection of widgets. Each child being delivered certain content at certain ages, completing certain contents at certain times. Our children learn that they become just cogs in a factory wheel.

I have two children. Into them they have had the same genes, similar formative experiences, similar amounts of years of preschool, same school growing up, and similar extracurriculars. For many things they are the same. As learners, they couldn't be more opposite. Both have the ability to learn at high levels but both demonstrate readiness and learning in different ways. Providing the factory-based methodology that we often provide would most often not meet either child's needs. What if we were to change the paradigm? What would it take to create the efficiencies of the factory model yet provide for the individual nature of child's development?

Big data has come to education. We are able to ask questions that we have never been able to ask before. We can identify with relative accuracy what content skills a child knows and what learning targets they should be working on next. When we ask deeper questions about those competencies and targets we frequently discover that the assessments are accurate but our age-based learning is not. By using the factory model we often create artificial ceilings for many children and push forward some children to attempt competencies they are not ready to master.

What would happen if we truly focused on what children need to learn next. Lets we let go of traditional grades, which rank children comparatively by age and don't tell us exactly what a child knows or doesn't know. Lets also let go of traditional standards-based grade models which tell us more about what a child knows but still rely on comparative rank while not identifying what each child needs to learn next. We could develop longitudinal frameworks for learning. What are all the competencies and skills within a subject a child needs to learn? Just like a patient's chart at a doctor's office, we could mark off the status of where the child is at now and what they need to accomplish next. From here, guided grouping could meaningfully occur. Simply, we add our longitudinal data to a database that also contains our standardized assessment data and we could provide in school meaningful learning opportunities with the personnel we have.

An example of this. Lets say we are working on number sense. If I have the longitudinal classroom data and standardized data, I could create groups relatively easily for a school, providing on concept instruction for children utilizing the staff I have. I query my data base, students at Alpha School with a Winter MAP Numbers and Operation RIT between 170-190, who have not completed "Understand Place Value up to 1000." Out comes the names and I have an instructional group. That group will contain 6 year olds, 7 year olds, and 8 year olds. Or as we like to call them 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders. If we schedule their math at the same time, we can have 1 teacher work with all of this group on these skills rather than 6 teachers work on or ignore these skills based on the needs of the whole group. Simply creating longitudinal frames for recording student progress allows us to create and triangulate student needs and facilitate better use of student and staff talents.

The factory model of learning creates artificial limits to student development. If we want truly appropriate learning and hope to maximize growth, we need to realize that children are more like bananas than beer. They are ripe for certain things at certain times. However, unlike bananas, they don't all ripen at the same rate. Giving the right dose of learning opportunity at the right time will us to use our staff's talents well and increase our learning growth rate for students.

Banana!!!

Banana Song