One-to-one schools ‘step through the looking glass’

When Alice, Lewis Carroll’s classic childhood literary heroine, stepped through the looking glass, she entered a world where she questioned her assumptions and jettisoned familiar rules. It’s no wonder, then, that Van Meter Community School Superintendent John Carver says the 630-student school district has “stepped through the looking glass” with a one-to-one initiative that trades textbooks for laptops in grades 6-12, connecting students to an infinite collection of human knowledge and for collaborations with peers around the country, and potentially changing the role of teachers from lecturers to facilitators and resource guides.

Behind Van Meter’s looking glass, students – or learners, as they’re known in the lexicon of 21st-century education – are more likely to browse the World Wide Web than traditional library shelves when researching papers and presentations. It’s a world where computer literacy is integrated in early childhood education, and young learners use technology to join a national celebration of Dr. Seuss’s birthday on Read Across America, or to drop in virtually on the Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska, where they find real-world applications for geography, math, history and biology. Or they might, as aspiring filmmaker Michael Kinley, 13, was on a typical morning in the classroom, be involved in a video chat with a classmate in Alaska about the scheduling commitments they both would have to make to include a young man from India in their fledgling virtual video editing club.

Laptop and tablet computers, smart phones and an emporium of other hand-held gizmos make it easier to personalize each student’s education and tailor instruction of the state’s core curriculum in areas that ignite their passions for learning, according to Van Meter school officials. What students research is important, educators say, but not as important as knowing how and where to access information, how to source and verify it, and how to apply it to real-world situations – a skill set that Carver says makes Van Meter graduates “some of the best prepared kids In Iowa” as the information age ends and what he calls the age of creativity and imagery begins.

Today’s students have grown up with technology and are comfortable using it to access information and network socially, so why not empower them to use it as a tool to enhance their learning, Van Meter educators asked themselves six years ago.

“Kids learn through technology,” said John Seefeld, a seven-year school board member and former board president who helped lead Van Meter’s transformation to a technology and information empowered school. “Should we say ‘come to school and turn it off’?”

Seefeld, an insurance executive in Des Moines and father of three, including two sons who graduated from Van Meter, said he’s witnessed a profound change in how students spend time away from the classroom.

“I used to see kids fooling around, as kids are often wont to do, chasing balls or whatever,” Seefeld said. “Now I see them sitting with their laptops, looking up stuff 24/7.”

Iowa’s go-to school for one-to-one how-to

Though not the first Iowa school to eschew an education model criticized as limited to the information in textbooks that quickly become outdated and a teacher’s interpretation and presentation of it, Van Meter is regarded by educators as farther ahead than many in using technology to unharness students’ academic potential. Consequently, Van Meter has developed a reputation as the premier research and development school in Iowa for teachers, administrators, state officials and others to visit to gain a better understanding of how such a transition works and pitfalls to avoid.

Said Sefeld: “People are coming to us saying, ‘You guys seem to have done it right.’”

Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass spent one of his first days on the job in January looking over the shoulders of Van Meter teachers and students. Glass had been following Van Meter’s initiative on the Twitter social network and in blogs, and he knew of the district’s growing national reputation and Carver’s unofficial status as “the evangelist of one-to-one devices for kids.”

“All the kids carry around laptops, but it’s not the device that is the change,” Glass said after visiting the plugged-in classrooms in January. “The most encouraging thing I saw at Van Meter was that they told me that when they first got the devices, it was kind of ‘paper down wire,’ taking the tools on paper and putting them online. Now, after two years of exploring the capacity of the devices, the kids and teachers are learning and evolving in their own knowledge of how powerful new technology can be.”

“They’re off to a brave start,” said Max A. Phillips, president of telecom giant Qwest’s Iowa operations and one of the most listened-to business leaders in the state, especially on 21st-century workforce issues.

“They’ve made a commitment to change certain parts of what they do to facilitate broader learning,” he said.

In all, 500 educators and dignitaries have visited in the year and nearly two years since Van Meter took its big leap, one the school board began mapping about six years ago in response to concerns that Des Moines suburbs might swallow up the small district in Dallas County’s fast-growing southeast corner.

Technology has catapulted education to “a printing-press moment in the history of mankind,” Carver said, and schools like Van Meter are responding with an approach to education “that doesn’t speak to the masses, but tries to hook students up with their passions and empower them to chase whatever dream they want.”

“In the next three to five years, everything we know will be turned upside,” he said. “Just as the printing press created a new social class – the mercantile class instead of just kings and peasants – we are creating a new class, and it’s going to be those who can access and use technology.”

There was nothing in the standard measures of student achievement, ACT and Iowa Tests of Basic Skills composite scores, that screamed a need for change, Carver said. Van Meter students have consistently scored comfortably above the state average in math, reading comprehension and other academic areas. But school board members and educators recognized that Van Meter students won’t just compete in the 21st-century job market against other Iowans, or even other Americans, but young people in China and other Pacific Rim countries.

And they realized that American approaches to education that haven’t fundamentally changed since the Industrial Revolution weren’t going to give Van Meter students an edge.

The old assembly line approach served education well during the Industrial Age, but now that society has moved through the information age and into what Carver calls the age of creativity begins, it’s as antiquated as Henry Ford’s Model-T.

The way students are taught today isn’t much different from the method Ford developed to assemble cars a century ago. Just as different components of the car were installed by experts in those processes, expert teachers in core curricular subject areas each contribute to a student’s education. The idea was that if teachers have done their jobs well, students leave the assembly line as well-rounded individuals. But, as with the automobile assembly line in which a flaw in carburetor installation could affect engine performance, mass-production techniques that assume all minds are sufficiently alike and don’t take into account different students’ abilities and learning styles can leave graduates sputtering in real life.

“Education is adrift, and we don’t know what it’s supposed to be,” said Carver, whose school is considered by many to be Iowa’s premier research and development school and other 21st-century school initiatives. “It needs a laser sharp focus.”

More than just a new pencil and paper

The initiative “couldn’t be just a new pencil and paper,” school board member Seefeld said.

“It had to be about teaching differently, using the technology, deigning your own learning opportunities and trying to be flexible,” he said. “Teachers thought that if they could empower kids with technology, that also changes their role to co-teaching. They don’t have to lecture to them, but point them in the right direction in a way that empowers them to learn instead of memorize. They’re learning how to learn, how to access data. That’s the key.”

Seefeld said he was “amazed at students’ attentiveness, how engaged they were and how they seemed to be learning better under the new format” when he and other board members and educators made fact-finding visits to other Iowa school districts that had been using laptops as learning tools for several years.

“We knew the mistakes that had been made in other schools and got lots of good perspectives,” Seefeld said.

Technology has allowed Van Meter to bridge some of the limitations of the traditional classroom lecture and create its own rules, as Alice did in Wonderland. For example, the Van Meter one-to-one initiative abandons rigid measurement standards and employs a philosophy similar to the Boy Scouts of America program. Scouts advance by earning merit badges, and may be 18, 16 or even younger when they become Eagle Scouts. Similarly, one student may zoom through a math curriculum in less than a semester, or take a full year to understand and apply mathematical concepts.

That’s one of the aspects of the program that most impressed Glass. “The old idea that you should have a certain achievement by age 12 or read at a certain level – if the student is not there, the impression is that they are not going to learn all kinds of stuff,” he said.

Glass also noted the power of personalized education plans to inspire students who previously might have participated little in classroom discussions.

“For the kid who used to sit in the back who never raised his hand or thought he had a voice, the connectivity with student-to-student and student-to-teacher is very powerful,” he said. “You go from having a one-way communication or correspondence to a real communication, an interaction. The boundaries fall when kids can communicate with anyone in the world.”

The Van Meter initiative disrupts education’s status quo, one of Glass’ key aims and state education director. He believes that to meet the challenges of the global economy and post-industrial era, education must become more innovative.

“I’m not here to defend the status quo, but neither am I here to dismantle public education,” he said. “It’s an institution that has served our country well, but we need to think about how we get off the assembly line.”

The case for change is strong. Iowa once was an undisputed leader among U.S. states in educational excellence, but has now fallen to the middle of the pack on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only state-by-state comparison of student progress. For example, the state’s eighth-graders were No. 1 in math in 1992, but rank 28th now, and their average score moved up only one point, to 284, in those nearly 20 years. Eighth-graders in Massachusetts, on the other hand, are now in first place, with an average score that moved to 299 from 273 over the same period.

“Iowa has been complacent and rested on the tradition of good schools for too long,” Glass said. “If you’re not getting better, you will get worse. There are shocks we have to do to the system to get it moving.”

Change the money

Critics of the assembly line method say its flaws could become fatal with tightening public education dollars. Iowa education is paid for from a mix of state aid in the form of income and sales taxes, local property taxes and local-option taxes. The Iowa Legislature controls the annual increase in dollars available per student through “allowable growth,” the most significant and equitable way to control and provide adequate funding for Iowa schools, and to ensure that all students in Iowa, regardless of geographic location, receives an equitable education.

In recent years, allowable growth has averaged 4 percent, but it’s likely to be between zero and 2 percent for fiscal year 2012. The Branstad administration has proposed zero percent allowable growth, while Senate Democrats want a 2 percent increase.

“The thing that would move education reform forward would be to change the money,” Phillips, the state school board member and telecom CEO, said. “Our present model needs more and more money all the time to support that approach. The answer is not more money, but redirecting present money.

“We have to blow up the status quo,” he said. “It’s not ‘how do you do what you did last year for less, but how do you do more than you did last year with less’?”

Some very small school districts with less state aid due to declining enrollments are already finding that embracing the one-to-one model allows them to offer more courses to students, exceeding the opportunities available through the Iowa Communications Network, a statewide fiber-optic system that facilitates distance learning. Gregg Cruickshank, superintendent of the South Page and Sidney school districts in southwest Iowa, said the ICN “has its place as far as connecting a teacher with two or three remote sites, but new technologies allow us to connect with anybody everywhere” for learning opportunities.

Cruickshank’s districts are already chipping away at the notion that school is in session for roughly seven hours a day. “If students need to work part-time and go to school part-time, this might break down some of those barriers,” he said.

Business needs thinkers, not followers

Factory teaching producers followers, not leaders and thinkers with the skill to retrieve and filter information and organize it into useful processes and systems that create change – the kind of graduates business executives say they need, said Phillips, a key member of the Iowa Business Council, a group of executives representing Iowa’s 20 largest businesses, the three Regents university presidents, and the president and CEO of Iowa’s largest banking association.

The IBC’s Education Excellence in Iowa Roundtable has developed white papers on improving public elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools while also producing better-prepared graduates for the demands of today’s global society.

“We don’t need people who are technically trained,” Phillips said, using his own telecommunications industry as an example. “We will train them. We need thinkers, people who can change and create change.”

Phillips said one of the critical problems facing education is that “the method has become the mission.”

By that, he means that though education sets forth broad goals to help students develop active and creative minds, for example, those goals are compartmentalized into time units – 50 minute classes, seven-hour days and 180-day school years. “When the way we do it becomes the mission, there’s no reason to change,” Phillips said.

He predicted change won’t come easily because old systems are deeply embedded, though he believes “concerns are only as insurmountable as we choose to let them be.”

“It’s tough to get out of what I am in when I’m up to my eyeballs in alligators today and try to think about tomorrow,” he said.

Glass agrees that leaving the industrial education model will be difficult.

“There are laws and processes built around the traditional model with one certified teacher. We will run into legal issues, and there will be fears about what we are looking at,” he said. “Even when we know it’s dysfunctional, we’re hanging onto them because we’re not sure what’s on the other side. There will not only be legal and statutory issues, but the emotional connection because we’ve always thought school was a place. School is not a building. Schools of the future will be devices, and learning will happen every day.”

One-to-one initiatives like the one in place in Van Meter and are a good start in the right direction, Glass said. Sixty Iowa schools have one-to-one models this year, and 100 will have implemented it next year.

“With the one-to-one movement, learning happens all the time – no more snow days, no more sick days because that paradigm is eroding away,” Glass said.

Laptop initiative ‘didn’t go far enough’

If Carver had it to do over, he’d recommend a laptop or other hand-held computing device for every student in the 630-student district.

When the one-to-one laptop initiative was rolled out in grades seven through 12 at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year, “we made a mistake,” Carver said. “We didn’t go far enough.”

In the recently completed school year, the initiative was extended to sixth-graders. And as funds and technology grants are identified, every student in grades K-12 will have an online device, whether a laptop or tablet computer, or a pocket-sized media player. With funding from the district’s Physical Plant and Equipment Levy (PPEL) and School Infrastructure Local Option (SILO) tax, those changes could be implemented by the 2012-2013 school year, when the current four-year lease with Apple expires.

The lease for the use of Apple’s Macintosh laptop computers and related products costs Van Meter $149,000 a year, which works out to be about $50 per computer.

The initiative is saving the district money in other areas, said Elementary Principal Maribeth Arentsen. “Work books was our largest expenditure,” Arentsen said. “Five years ago, we got rid of our workbooks and all funds now are for focused instructional materials.”

The Iowa Department of Education’s Glass said competition has lowered technology costs, making laptop initiatives an affordable option for more Iowa school districts. “We’ve hit a tipping point where it’s just about as cheap to move forward with one-to-one devices than it is to buy textbooks that are outdated as soon as they’re sent out,” Glass said.

Technology could change more at Van Meter than just the way students learn. Students use three-dimensional stereoscopic BodyViz software developed at the Cyber Innovation Institute in Iowa State University Research Park to study anatomy and related subjects, but the technology could eventually change the way student academic performance is evaluated.

“If we were to take an MRI of a student’s brain at the beginning and end of each school year, we should be able to measure how much learning that kid has done,” Carver said. “We have the technology. We just have to hook up with neuroscience. It becomes a diagnostic tool on how they are learning.”

Rockwell Collins, a Cedar Rapids-based company supplying electronics components to the aeronautics industry worldwide, provided Van Meter with the equipment as part of its Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder project, the idea being that students retain more information in hands-on visual tasks than in written tasks. Rockwell Collins eventually plans to equip 400 Iowa school districts with the software and expand the program nationally.

(Editor’s note: This is the first portion of a two-part series. The second portion, “Old factory approach to education makes the case for change,” is also available.)