The 21st Century Principal

Los Gatos, CA – June 17, 2014 — OpenEd (www.OpenEd.io), the largest K-12 educational resource catalog, today announced a free tool designed to enable teachers to easily create assessments with the question types required by Common Core standards. OpenEd’s assessment creation tool enables educators to create tests incorporating their own questions, or existing questions automatically suggested by OpenEd’s unique educational recommendation engine. The assessment tool supports traditional question types such as Multiple Choice and True or False as well as newer types such as Multiple Response, Free Response and Composite Items.

OpenEd’s assessment creation tool also allows teachers to associate resources to individual questions. Should a student miss a question on an assessment, OpenEd automatically recommends resources such as videos or games they can review to achieve mastery.

“When we added assessments to our library, we found that there wasn’t a wealth of free, quality content. Since formative assessments are such an important tool, we asked our teacher community what they used for creating them. The answers we heard varied from Google Forms to Hot Potatoes to handwritten worksheets,” said Adam Blum, CEO and co-founder, OpenEd. “But none of the currently available free tools supported the types of questions required by the Common Core. So we decided to create one and make it free and open source. And our recommended resources functionality finally makes it practical for teachers to personalize content for each student based on the results of formative assessments.”

With the largest catalog of standard-aligned videos and games – all curated by educators – OpenEd provides teachers and parents with a free, simple tool to find videos, games and assessments that enliven lesson plans and aid students in class or at home. OpenEd provides teachers with powerful content to refresh their lesson plans, blend media content into classroom lectures and aid students with their work in class or at home. 

To visit OpenEd go to www.OpenEd.io.

OpenEd Assessment Creation Tool - www.OpenEd.io/#!/assessments
• Free and Open Source
• Intuitive interface allows educators to quickly create quality assessments
• Supports IMS QTI import
• Unique recommendation engine auto-suggests questions based on standards and other metadata
• Allows educators to attach supplemental videos or games to questions
• Recommends content for intervention for students’ weak points based on assessment results

About OpenEd
OpenEd was founded in 2012 with the goal of enabling teachers to have access to the best educational resources for their students, with a focus on finding the right resources to teach Common Core standards. To do this, OpenEd has built the world's largest catalog of educational videos, games and assessments. OpenEd is committed to keeping all content available free to all educators worldwide. For more info visit www.OpenEd.io

The debate over Common Core continues. This video captures a high school senior Ethan Young speaking eloquently about some of the concerns about establishing a national curriculum and our current education system's obsession with testing, accountability and standards. Perhaps our policymakers forget that standardization doesn't equal equity though they might think so. Maybe it is equally true that many who are so powerfully pushing these new standards are the very ones who stand to benefit the most financially from their implementation. Take a look at Ethan Young's take on this. It renews our faith that young people are passionate and do care about their education.

“The real role of leadership in education is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control; creating a climate of possibility, and if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things you did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.” Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talk "How to Escape Education's Death Valley"

What is ultimately wrong with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core State Standards? Each of these initiatives are a product of what Sir Ken Robinson calls mechanistic thinking. In mechanistic thinking, education is seen as an “industrial process” done to kids. You subject kids to this process, and at the end, you test them, then declare (or not declare) them college and career ready, educated, or whatever term you choose. As Robinson points out in his TED Talk "How to Escape Education's Death Valley," subjecting kids to these kinds initiatives and the standardization movement means millions of children have been left behind.

Why are so many children left behind in the current American system of education? The whole problem, according to Robinson, is simple: American education "contradicts 3 principles under which human life flourishes." These principles are: 1) Human beings are naturally different and diverse, 2) Human beings are naturally curious creatures, and 3) Human life is inherently creative. By contradicting these principles, we are losing students because the American system of education ignores the very things that allow humans to thrive and survive.

There's no denying that these fundamental principles of humanity are ignored in an education culture where standardization and conformity are elevated above principles of diversity, curiosity, and creativity. But what can we do, as school leaders, to create a "climate of possibility and creativity?" Perhaps we can begin to establish that climate by doing three things:

1. We can treat students as different and diverse, not as standardized unfinished products to which we "add value" through subjecting them to the same curriculum and the same tests. Education under No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core is all about conformity and standardization, not diversity. Each of the initiatives is about narrowing the curriculum so that we can test kids the same way, compare their scores, and boast or censure what we have done educationally. Instead of moving more and more toward standardization, we need to be moving to personalization. Under a personalized education system we capitalize on students' natural talents and abilities, not stifle them with standard curriculum and standardized testing. As 21st century school leaders we need to focus not on data entirely, but more on individual students. Drop out rates, proficiency rates, growth rates are not the center of what we should be doing as educators. Kids are.

2. We can recognize that human beings are naturally curious creatures, and create systems of education that value curiosity above all else. As Robinson points out, “Curiosity is the engine of achievement.” Yet in our efforts to treat our education system mechanistically, we stamp our curiosity with standardized curriculum and standardized testing. We treat “teaching” as a delivery system, when it should be treated as the "art of mentally stimulating, provoking, and engaging children in learning."  Robinson points out that the dominate culture in American education does not focus on teaching and learning, it focuses on testing. We have turned our schools into places where the culture is about compliance, not curiosity. As 21st century school leaders we need to make human curiosity central to our school cultures, not compliance.

3. We can recognize in our schools that human beings are inherently creative and turn them into places where creativity is valued. We spend our whole lives creating; it is a part of who we are as humans. Our role as educators should be to awaken this creativity and power it up, instead, we are too busy standardizing everything and stifling creativity. Our students should be engaged creatively, not engaged in test prep and testing at the expense of all else. As 21st century school leaders we need to create a school culture that values creativity above standardization and conformity.



Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk: How to Escape Education's Death Valley


As long as policymakers at the national level, state level, and the district level continue to see education as this mechanistic, industrial process that is “done to kids” we're going to continue to have an education system that fails a large number of students. Changing our tests and our standards every few years is not going to create a climate of possibility and creativity in our schools. It only perpetuates the mechanistic system of education that has failed many of our kids for over a hundred years.

What if you only had time and money to use and purchase six tools to teach your entire curriculum? What would those six tools be? Authors Harvey Silver, R. Thomas Dewing, and Matthew Perini seem to do just that in their book The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with Common Core.

Many of us are right in the midst to implementing the Common Core Standards, whether we philosophically agree or disagree with the need for their existence. School leaders and teachers are scrambling to find and create tools for implementation, and the massively growing number of new books and materials about the Common Core aren’t making this task any easier. However, there are few that focus on the “essentials” to the degree that The Core Six does. This concise volume (it’s only 78 pages) lays what it calls “Six Core Practices Students Need to Cultivate to Become Independent Learners.”

According to this book, "The Core Six” are strategies that foster college and career-readiness, and at the same time, address the Common Core Standards. These six strategies, according to Silver, Dewing, and Perini are:

1. Reading for Meaning: This strategy helps students develop the skills to be proficient, effective readers and make sense of text.
2. Compare and Contrast: This strategy teaches students to conduct comparative analysis, thereby getting them to learn content at a much deeper level.
3. Inductive Learning: Inductive Learning as a strategy helps students see patterns and structures in content by using inductive processes.
4. Circle of Knowledge: Circle of Knowledge is a strategic framework for planning and conducting engaging classroom discussions that get students to think deeply and communicate thoughtfully.
5. Write to Learn: As a strategy, Write to Learn gives teachers a way to integrate writing into daily instruction and use writing skills to develop students’ ability to write in the “key text types” that they need to be college and career ready.
6. Vocabulary’s CODE: This “strategic approach” to vocabulary instruction gives students the ability to retain and use academic vocabulary.

Because of its straightforward, here-it-is style, The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core is far from being what I would call “engaging read.”  It’s strength, however, lies in this straightforward review of these six solid research-based teaching strategies.

With each of the “Core Six Essential Strategies” the authors begin with a brief description of the strategy, then they provide a quick list of reasons to use that strategy. Next, they describe the research supporting each strategy and provide the principles of implementation. They end the review of each "Core Six Essential" with some classroom examples of implementation, and things to consider when planning to use the strategy. This formula of presenting each strategy makes it quite easy to take what is learned back to the classroom.

If you are on a quest for a simple, straightforward book that gives teachers high-yield teaching strategies for the Common Core implementation efforts, then The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core is a solid choice.

The one lesson politicians should have learned from No Child Left Behind, is that when all of your energies and resources are turned to just improving test scores, failure is the result.  As education historian Diane Ravitch states eloquently in her book, The Death and the Life of the Great American School System, ”Our schools will not improve if we rely exclusively on tests as the means of deciding the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools.” Sadly, I’m not sure our current political leaders have learned the lesson yet that schools will not improve by solely focusing on using test scores and standards to improve them.

Our national education policy is still dominated by a “test-centric” approach to reform that ignores so many other factors that impact education such as poverty, inadequate health care, and lack of gainful employment. According to education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, “The United States has the highest poverty rate for children among industrialized nations,” (The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond, 2010). We want to “Race to the Top” but we’re looking for short cuts to get there. We want standards and “better tests” but we don’t want to engage in the hard, difficult work of addressing poverty, lack of health care, lack of good, affordable housing, and lack of opportunity for jobs with living wages. As long as national education policy is driven by a blind belief in test results and national standards, 10 years from now, we will be either staring at the same dismal  conditions both educationally and economically if we’re lucky, or we will be much worse with a society with an even wider gap between those that have and those that have not.

What then is the answer? Just how bad are things in different parts of the country? This morning I stumbled upon a 5-year initiative by the American Federation of Teachers and partners like Cisco, Blue Cross Blue Shield, College Board, among many others, that focuses on the educational improvement of an entire community ravaged by unemployment, lost opportunity and lost promise. McDowell County West Virginia has not fared well at all since 1980 and that community is the focus of this initiative.


While it is easy to become entangled in the debate about the role of teachers unions in education when debating education policy, I think it is admirable that the AFT and its partners are putting into practice what they’ve been trying to make politicians understand all along; education reform must do more than focus on test scores and standards. It has to also address the dreadful conditions some of our fellow US citizens find themselves living in.

With this post, I am not taking sides in the debate about unions per se. I do believe, after 20+ years experience, and seeing countless students struggling to live in forgotten communities without the basics most of us take for granted, that the answer to our problems as a country lies, not in investing in more and different tests, or in national standards, but in focusing on the crushing problems facing our poorest students.

After watching the video below about “Reconnecting McDowell” I was reminded of an incident that happened in one of the schools where I once worked. I walked by a table during lunch one day, and a young 11 year old girl sat there with her head down. She had enormous tears in her eyes. I walked up, leaned down and asked her to step out the lunchroom for a minute. Once out of the hearing of others, I asked, “What’s wrong?” Through her tears, she blurted, “I don’t have any lunch money. My parents didn’t have any to give me.” She proceeded to tell me that when she went through the lunch line, the cafeteria took her plate away and refused to serve her lunch because she owed so much money. I took her back through the lunch line and told her to get anything she wanted, and that it would be taken care of. You can debate all you want about why a child does not have money to eat. You can accuse her parents of not taking care of her, but the reality for her is she was not going to be able to eat that day, and a focus on raising her test scores was not going to change that reality.

As I understand it, Reconnecting McDowell is an effort to try to improve the education of a community, and not do it by just focusing on test scores. It is an effort to focus on poverty, healthcare, housing, and  a broken community. I have been to McDowell County West Virginia and have seen firsthand all that the video describes. That is why this effort caught my attention. Poverty is real, and those of us who have worked in schools where it exists know its faces.


Link to Reconnecting McDowell Web Site.