KM in Education

Sharing instruction through curriculum mapping

While speaking with a charter school start-up today, I learned of their recent selection of a curriculum mapping tool to enable collaboration and sharing of instruction planning and assessment among teachers and administration. I decided to learn more about curriculum mapping and have summarized below what I found.

Curriculum mapping appears to have grown out of the pioneering ideas in Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' book, Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K–12. In her first chaper, she writes:

With so little real-time data available, we find two polarized tendencies. One is to become rigid and lock step with curriculum guides, giving the impression that all is under control. The second is to become so loose and vague that no one seems to have a clue as to what is going on.

To make sense of our students' experiences over time, we need two lenses: a zoom lens into this year's curriculum for a particular grade and a wide-angle lens to see the K–12 perspective. The classroom (or micro) level is dependent on the site and district level (a macro view)....We need to change the process used in making curriculum decisions because most curriculum committees are ineffective at actually producing work that directly affects student performance.

What Dr. Jacobs proposes is a method that transforms curriculum planning into a vehicle for communication, collaboration and ongoing dynamic review of instructional planning. She also introduces the novel approach of taking a student's perspective in looking at the curriculum holistically and longitudinally to identify redundancies or gaps.

The first two chapters of Dr. Jacobs book provide a good overview of the process and reasons behind curriculum mapping. For a good primer on curriculum maps and different models, consult Least Tern's presentation.

The market for curriculum mapping is fast evolving, as many sites list outdated names and links. The major players all make reference to Dr. Jacobs' methodology as the basis for their design.

Among the more recognized curriculum mapping tools, I found:
AEL's Curriculum Creator - Curriculum Mapping & Design Tool
Atlas Curriculum Management System
Techpaths
WestJam's Curriculum Mapper

Additional players include:
Scantron's Curriculum Designer
Schoolution's MyLessonBuilder and CurrMapper

Beyond these vendors, many organizations such as NCREL and individuals offer consulting services for curriculum mapping.

Dr. Jacobs' site for curriculum design offers further resources.

Technical coordination

The latest knowledge efforts in public education have been dictated by government regulations such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). School processes are changing to meet new NCLB requirements and, in the process, have had to often upgrade their technical capabilities. For example, before NCLB, longitudinal student data was only collected by a handful of states. Now, about half of the states are equipped with systems to collect longitudinal student data, mainly to meet NCLB and state reporting requirements. A 2002 policy brief published by the Education Commission of the States provides a clear explanation of how NCLB would impact state information systems.

By upgrading their processes and relevant systems, states have increased their technical capacity for coordinating different sources of knowledge. Linking attendance data with performance data at the individual level creates a more complete picture of a student, empowering schools with new knowledge. However, with these upgrades, many districts have also found themselves grappling with different types of systems and even more data and content.

In my next posting I will briefly describe a couple of these systems and the challenges they pose.

iPods on Campus

In less than 2 weeks, Duke University incoming freshmen will be receiving iPods in a one-year pilot program between Duke and Apple. Most people recognize the iPod devices as a pocket-size digital music player popular among teens.

According to its press release, Duke is now adopting this latest hot technology to facilitate education innovation on campus. iPods will bring students creative course content, from language lessons to, of course, music to complement curricula. By preloading material, Duke will also provide students with an easily accessible resource for all the orientation information they may need, including their academic calendar and their school fight song. It is also hoped that students will also discover new ways to use iPods in education and campus life.

The initial price tag for the program: $500,000. Given the flurry of media attention it attracted, this first university experiment of its kind will be closely watched over the next year.

Effective principal preparation

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

This quote from Machiavelli's The Prince perfectly describes a new principal's role in a school. Strong and effective leadership by principals is essential to introducing innovation to schools. And most current principals claim that these leadership skills are gained on the job, not in the classroom.

To develop these necessary leadership skills, many principal training programs now include a residency or internship where principals-in-training spend part of their session at a school, learning 'on the job.' Consider instead the possibility of a simulation exercise that incorporates the lessons learned from many experienced principals. Wouldn't such an experience enable aspiring principals to 'learn by doing' with even more exposure to different scenarios? Principal users would also have the benefit of exploring different approaches in a risk-free environment with the ability to share insights and perspectives from a common experience with other principals.

It is exactly such a project that I undertook to design last year with Albert Angehrn at the Center for Advanced Learning Technologies. Interviews with experienced U.S. teachers and principals helped generate a knowledge base from which to design instructional scenarios that would highlight effective and ineffective ways to lead school transformation. Such a simulation is a great example of how tacit knowledge residing in the heads of experienced principals can be converted and absorbed as tacit knowledge for principals-in-training.

It remains to be seen if principal preparation programs integrate more of these experiential learning activities into their curricula.

Sharing Resources in Education Philanthropy

Grantmakers for Education is a national network of foundations, corporate giving programs, and donors whose primary focus is to improve education. With large sums of money flowing into K-12 education from organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has donated close to $1 billion to K-12 education since its inception, education philanthropies have decided that pooling their knowledge resources will help their dollars be more effective in improving education outcomes. GFE has even started a formal KM initiative as a means to share expertise and information among education philanthropies. It remains to be seen which grantmaker will carry forward the same strategy for K-12 education itself.

Weblogs in Education

Today I decided to explore how far weblogs or blogs have permeated the education world. Blogs promise to be a technology that changes the process by which people interact. It's a much faster, easier, and cheaper way to communicate, collaborate, and share your thoughts. The education world may have to pick it up quickly, simply because adolescents are flocking to this new form of self-expression.

Some educators are definitely hard at work identifying new ways to use blogs in their teaching:

Anne Davis, who maintains an insightful blog on the subject, has created a website that provides a great overview of effective weblogs in the classroom.

Will Richardson maintains Weblogg-ed, another useful site for educators about using weblogs and related technologies in the classroom. I personally like one reader study guide created by a Modern American Literature class at his school, complemented by the online parents' book club.

The Educational Bloggers Network provides a forum for teachers and education professionals to collaborate on the use of blogs for teaching and learning, especially in the areas of reading and writing.

Also, there are a growing number of content-specific sites such as Christine Terry's blog on bringing science into the classroom.

Blogs are also being tapped for other uses in education, but these areas seem to be less developed:

A mentor and entry year teacher used a blog to capture their experiences and reflections. It is a brilliant approach to capturing the process of being a new teacher while enabling him/her to reflect on it and develop a very useful resource for the future.

Technologists in K-12 education have also started blogs to share their learnings. I came across the K-12 Tech Guy and The Savvy Technologist as two examples at one school.

A handful of schools and school districts such as Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon and Kern County Superintendent of Schools in Bakersfield, CA are using blogs to communicate with their communities.

It will be exciting to see how increasing use of education blogs may change the process by which students learn and by which schools operate.

Cross-Pollination

While I spoke today with Julie Schoknecht, formerly of New Sector Alliance, we were struck by our reverse career paths. As I, an ex-consultant, venture into the non-profit world, she is leaving it to go into corporate consulting.

It is due in part to the lack of people who make these transitions that organizations such as New Sector Alliance emerged to create innovative partnerships to bridge the gap among the business, academic, and non-profit worlds. Its founder and president, Carly Janson, recognized the high-impact potential for sharing resources across these traditionally divided sectors. By bringing the skills and knowledge of business professionals and students to non-profit enterprises, New Sector helps maximize social impact, as well as develop leadership experience in the social sector.

New Sector highlights the potential for sharing knowledge and experience across sectors. They have worked with some education organizations, including KIPP, Citizen Schools, and Breakthrough Collaborative. But that is only the tip of the iceberg in the education world.

K-12 education has the potential to benefit immensely from this form of cross-pollination. I am continually in search of partners and ideas to help accelerate this trend. Please e-mail me if you think you can contribute to my search.

Education Leaders as Knowledge Leaders

Singapore students are consistently ranked as top performers in international comparative assessments in mathematics and science. Yet the Singapore government has been quick to realize that innovation, and not high assessment scores, is what is needed to sustain their country's strong economy. As a result, Singapore's Ministry of Education is working furiously to transform their educational system by embracing principles of the knowledge management cycle to drive superior performance. Ken Stott, who directs the principal training programs at Singapore's National Institute of Education, has written a paper explaining how enabling extraordinary leaders to generate new knowledge has become the crux of principal training. Principals must become knowledge leaders, to help their schools innovate beyond best practices.

Singapore's approximately 400 schools and 25,000 teachers equate to less than 1% of the over 90,000 public schools and 3 million teachers in the U.S. Over time, organizations such as the Broad Foundation, KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, and the NYC Leadership Academy are gradually adding outstanding principals to the leadership ranks of U.S. public schools. If these organizations were to train 5,000 principals a year (which is probably 10 times their current volume), it would take 18 years to reach all U.S. principals. To make the transformation of our monolithic public education system possible, KM is going to be critical for dissemination and application of successful innovation. School leaders in the U.S. will truly have to become knowledge leaders in all its facets, from creation to application to dissemination.