Final Lacrosse Championship

Let me just say once and for all, "Ow!"

For thirty years I've been saying that every time I get hit with a wayward shot, a slah to my arms, knees or head, or I check some streaking midfielder or goal-hungry attackman. Thirty years is a long time to play lacrosse; my wife thinks it's too long and she's finally convinced me to hang it up and start hanging around on weekends.

This past weekend I had the bittersweet pleasure of playing in my final championship game with the men of Coopers Lacrosse Team, http://www.cooperslax.com/ beating our arch-rivals Huron Lacrosse team 10-9 in an nail bitter to win the "Everett Smith Cup" one more time.

I've played with Coopers Lacrosse Team for the last twenty seasons. No kidding: twenty seasons! Over those 20 seasons with Coopers I've sustained inestimable ankle blow-outs, knee surgeries, fractured ribs, broken collarbones, broken wrists, and assorted deep purple bruising. I've consumed mountains of Motrin, been encased in ice and have had so many holes repaired in my meniscuses (menisci?) that my surgeon and I have become buddies (of course, he's a lacrosse player as well).

For two decades the same core group of guys has played together through the Northwest Rain, on frozen fields, in hail and on occasional sunny days. We really know each other, and more importantly, we really like each other. We've won the championship finals 11 out of the 14 years we've had a championship finals. No team has ever beaten us more than once in the finals.

That's something we can all say with pride. As our ageless captain Tim "Mac" McGarity says, "Coopers is more than a team; we're a bunch of pirates that come together to realize a collective goal on the field of battle."

That is a great analogy, Mac.

Now pass the Motrin.

Action Research: Towards a New Paradigm for Education Technology Research

What impact does technology have on improving teaching and learning?

As any teacher who effectively wields technology will tell you, the answer is achingly obvious: teachers enjoy teaching in a technology-rich environment and are therefore more effective at meeting students’ learning needs; students enjoy learning in a technology rich environment and so they naturally learn more. The research literature is replete with qualitative data, anecdotal evidence, and “feel good” stories about our national investment in learning technologies.

However, for the past twenty years or more, this essential research question has yielded insufficient (or disappointing) quantitative evidence. We now know much about instructional strategies, assessment practices and curriculum design that work, but we still don’t have much data in the way of educational technology that works – until now.

Is the problem that technology has no effect on student learning, as a US Department of Education study recently found, or have we been erroneously framing education research through the lens of medical empiricism?

Perhaps this question is best explained through an analogy: Before a genetically engineered drug for diabetes makes it to the pharmaceutical market, independent, randomly assigned, “double blind” research trials would first be required.

The term “randomly assigned” refers to the process of selecting diabetic patients into the experimental group who would receive the actual drug, or the control group who would receive a “placebo.” The term “double blind” refers to the process whereby the patients selected for the trials, and their doctors, would not know if they were receiving or giving the experimental drug or the placebo. This, generally speaking, is a standard empirical process in medical trials for eliminating as many variables as possible and determining the effect of a single experimental variable – the drug itself

There are many problems associated with overlaying this standard of research into extant sociological contexts – like K12 classrooms.

It is absurd to consider that a teacher would be “blind” to the intervention he or she might, or might not, implement with experimental or control groups of students. It also stands to reason that students in the experimental or control groups could not possibly be “blind” to the technology intervention that they would be using or receiving

While it is not impossible, it is also very difficult for teachers to be randomly assigned in experimental trials. Rather, voluntary teacher participation in Action Research Studies is becoming the norm, if not the “gold standard” for education research

As a company developed by educators for educators, Promethean determined it was our obligation to meet this conundrum head-on.

Promethean commissioned internationally esteemed education researcher and author, Dr. Robert Marzano to conduct independent, third party research on the effect of Promethean’s ActivClassroom Suite of technologies on student learning. Over the past academic year, Dr. Robert Marzano conducted a much-anticipated meta-analysis of numerous action research studies on the direct effect of Promethean’s transformational technologies on academic achievement. His recently published study, “Evaluation Study of Promethean’s ActivClassroom on Student Achievement” represents a breakthrough for educational technology research in general, and Promethean’s ActivClassroom in particular.

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Marzano at the Marzano Research Laboratory www.marzanoresearch.com in Denver where we discussed the nature of education technology research, the findings from his study of Promethean’s ActivClassroom, and the future direction of this multi-year research and development partnership

The video podcast of this interview has been published in Promethean’s Innovation in Education Thought Leadership Webcast Series. To view the video podcast, please go to www.prometheanworld.com. As always, I hope you find your Promethean experience enlightening.

A New Era

Well, it's been a while. For that I apologize. However, given the calamitous nature of this past year's political skullduggery, I should be afforded a modicum of lenience.

I've been doing a lot of hoping lately. In fact, I've been diligently practicing what Herb Kohl (one of my top three education heroes) describes as The Discipline of Hope. For hope is indeed a discipline - not in the conformist, rather negative sense of punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior, but rather in the sense that discipline yields liberation. The discipline of hope directs one's perspicacity towards the attainment of some desirable happenstance. For me, that happenstance has been freeing our nation's youth from the punitive, oppressive - and decided political - talons of NCLB.

A few years ago I was attending the Building Learning Communities conference on a sweltering July afternoon in Boston. Founded by my friend Alan November (another of my top three education heroes), BLC brings together some of the most progressive minds in education from across the globe to revel at the edge of educational possibilities. On this particular day, the keynote address was given by Professor Andy Hargreaves the "Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College." (Andy must have very long business card.)

Andy said that from his perspective (ostensibly from the Thomas More Brennan Chair) "America is the last English-speaking country to attempt to colonize the sinking sands of standardization." Every other nation which had previously wielded standardization as a political bludgeon had failed to achieve any lasting improvements in student learning. In a free society, he said, standardization was utterly unsustainable as a social, educational, or political tool. "A new era is coming," he said, "The era of post-standardization. And we had better get ready."

Last November 4th, on an usually balmy night, I witnessed the most sweeping political change in my lifetime standing among the ecstatic swells of other hopefuls in Chicago's Grant Park. Could the election of "Team Obama" be the harbinger of this new era? "We'll see," said the Zen Master.

We'll see indeed.