Decisive Schools 2010: Q & A Notes
Recorded* at State Teachers Assembly,
Panel on Teacher Preparation for Near Future Education
Donna Pahl Wilkinson, Moderator
Peoria, IL
Decisive Schools 2010 exists as a concept drawn from professional literature and assembled like a puzzle. This Q & A is for people who have come to wonder and ask this question: “How and why would someone assemble available technologies in order to accelerate student learning?” My instant response is, “Why not?”
I suppose curious students, educators, as well as members of that mythical “educated public” have asked themselves these questions. Many of the answers come from common knowledge among people familiar with the 20th century part of schooling that addresses behavior patterns, behavior changes, and learning theories derived from experimental studies.
This is an invitation to an intellectual world I consider profoundly exciting, relevant, and timely. Schooling has been an on-going experiment throughout recorded history. Few fixed rules exist to conduct a school aside from conventions and philosophy.
Schooling includes a large arena with room for more experiments.
Perhaps someone will create and operate a Decisive School and test empirically the following questions and answers.
Q: What is a Decisive School 2010?
A: A Decisive School reduces risks by 2010 of students failing to learn what state legislatures name in state academic standards as the minimum each student should learn during each academic year.
Students who exceed minimum standards may also accelerate their learning beyond the highest expectations for their ages through Decisive Schools.
These schools use decision theory to operate evolving real time databases of student responses to lessons. Teachers use these data to adjust next lessons in order to increase student learning rates.
Q: Does that mean Decisive Schools offer remedial programs?
A: They support any student learning as rapidly as students choose about basic principles used in the traditional seven liberal arts, the conventional core of Pre-K20 schools. Liberal arts give priority to knowledge and intellectual skills over their application. In contemporary terms, liberal arts include grammar (language), logic, speech (rhetoric), mathematics, music, history, and science. Each has commonly accepted rules of performance. Decisive Schools assist students to master these rules rapidly.
Q: Where can I see a Decisive School?
A: A Decisive School is a concept of what can exist by 2010. The concept gives focus to ways educators can organize existing instructional protocols, electronic hardware such as Tablet PCs, Ultra-Mobile PCs, and software to accelerate student learning.
Q: What does the name Decisive School mean? It appears to denigrate other schools.
A: The name means that educators use electronic databases organized to identify certainties and risks of students meeting learning criteria for a lesson. These data augment professional judgments. Decisive Schools evolve from decades of tangible and intangible advanced technologies in schools and training settings.
Q: What are tangible and intangible advanced technologies?
A: Tangible advanced technologies include servers, mobile PCs and related software. Intangible advanced technologies are intellectual skills. They consist of systems of technical procedures for accelerating learning, for example using a decision tree to select from alternative consequences to a lesson item; analyzing an instructional task; and increasing the chances of a learner’s response occurring again.
Q: Why do you think this is not Orwellian? It sounds so manipulative.
A: Teachers do their best to help students learn assigned lessons. Decisive Schools follow designs that help teachers manage their instruction more efficiently. These designs allow the collection of data about instruction and student responses. Teachers use these data to adjust instruction, so students accelerate learning.
Advanced intellectual and electronic technologies provide tools for data collection and calculation of the likelihood of consequences of instruction for individuals and classes. These technologies reduce some of the educated guessing that even the most experienced and sophisticated teachers use to plan and conduct lessons.
Q: What do you mean teachers make educated guesses in planning and conducting lessons? Don’t they know what to do?
A: No teacher knows everything about any lesson or about learning patterns of any student or of any classroom of students. Sometimes subtleties of lesson content or of instructional presentation matter. Decisive School databases identify likely responses individuals and classrooms of students will give to each lesson. These data provide a numerical level of confidence for a teacher to have before and after a part or whole lesson.
Q: If Decisive Schools are so great, why don’t they already exist? Why would they form now and not earlier?
A: Five reasons exist to allow Decisive Schools now.
First, mobile PCs such as Tablets and Ultra-Mobile PCs make it possible to collect individual student responses easier and more efficiently than previous pencil and paper ways.
Second, more educators use mobile PCs in classrooms than previously. They provide an experience base for creating a Decisive School.
Third, students know and adapt readily to using mobile PCs in schools. They also provide an experience based for forming a Decisive School.
Fourth, enough pieces of a Decisive School exist with an intellectual and empirical base to permit confidence in assembling a school program that uses decision theory to organize instruction, at least in part.
Fifth, taxpayers and other education supporters accept experimenting with advanced technologies in schooling. Many recognize that students might benefit more from different schooling.
In other words, the social and technical context exists for educators to assemble a school that uses databases to supplement routine judgments by educators.
Q: What pieces of a Decisive School exist?
A: Several programs exist in practice and professional literature. They were developed and tested empirically in instructional settings during the past four decades.
Here’s a beginning list: Direct Instruction (S. Engelmann, Direct Learning (L.C. Heiny), Precision Teaching (O. Lindsley), Contingency Management (B.F. Skinner), Try Another Way (M. Gold), and Two-Choice Visual Discrimination Learning (D. Zeaman & B. House).
Also, descriptions exist in professional literature of uses of statistics, such as with pinball machines as a metaphor for yielding life chances (including student learning in schools), and Walden II as a story about stimulus-response (contingency) management to operate a social group.
Q: Where do these databases come from? They sound expensive. What are they?
A: Databases used in Decisive Schools consist of counts of each student’s responses to lessons. They offer more detailed item by item analysis of routine student responses to daily lessons than a traditionally prepared Stanford-Binet psychometrist reports. They include such details as the number of attempts a student gets correct to similar questions, the quality of these questions, and the length of time to respond to similar questions as well as converting these data into probabilities of alternative consequences for students to a teacher’s lessons. Tablet PCs and other mobile PCs collect these counts. Software organizes counts into probabilities of each student’s or classes’ responses. Teachers choose which alternative responses they want and arrange instruction to yield those results.
Q: Do these databases exist? Does any school use them? What’s the cost?
A: These databases do not exist as electronic devices in a school. A team could assemble in 150 business work hours a conceptual model, a work plan for creating a proof of concept prototype, and a sample Tablet PC instruction software program adapted to collect data for the database.
A company would assemble a first team in cooperation with a local school agency. Team membership would include a database system developer, a server software developer, a Tablet PC software developer, an educator familiar with Tablet PCs and Ultra-Mobile PCs as instruction tools, a classically prepared educational psychometrist, a decision theory and management specialist, a statistician specializing in probabilities of small events, a curriculum development specialist, and a behavioral analyst familiar with task analysis for effective and efficient learning. An observer would record discussions and would report outcomes in whatever media seemed most useful for next steps in developing one or more databases for accelerating learning.
Personnel would cost $15-20,000, unless companies would donate technical time, perhaps in exchange for partial rights. Probably an investor would underwrite the venture with funding provided for evolving development stages. Elapsed time for an Alpha version of a database would be 12 months, and 18 months for a Beta version. Both will be versions of a school installation proof of concept.
Q: Does a development team exist?
A: Not that I know about for a Decisive School.
Q: How much must a licensed educator change to teach in a Decisive School?
A: Teachers who use behavioral sciences to organize lessons and teachers who adapt instruction on-the-fly to assist individual students will adjust to Decisive School operations without shifting paradigms. All teachers would need to learn to use database information. Some shift would occur in vocabulary. For example, you’ll hear and read reference to accelerating learning, learning rates, data centric lesson plans, decision management, alternative consequences, and other parts of using the “If …, then …” proposition for organizing learning.
Q: Why would I want to work with numbers from some database? I’m a teacher, a people person. I want to work with people, not machines or numbers.
A: Teachers work with tools like pencils, paper, printed books, and projectors in order to make their work with people more effective and efficient. Teachers can also learn to use mobile PCs, servers, and numbers so that students accelerate their learning.
In other words, these tools assist teachers accomplish what they intend with students. After they become proficient with tools, they don’t have to use them, if decision management and databased information doesn’t accomplish more than without these tools for less cost.
Q: Can a single teacher use decision theory without a Decisive School or another kind of support?
A: Yes, now by calculating manually the likelihood of students responding as wanted. Probably by 2010, mobile PC software developers will offer such analyses built into selected academic packages or will offer supplemental applications. In any of these conditions, individuals may use aspects of decision trees to accelerate learning.
Q: What’s different about Decisive Schools from the schools with advanced technologies, especially those already using mobile PCs and total school strategies?
A: Decisive Schools give priority to accelerating student learning. This priority includes evolving databases created in part with mobile PCs that students use. In Decisive Schools, each activity must empirically demonstrate that it directly contributes to accelerating learning of individuals and of aggregates of students.
Q: What grade levels and subjects would you start with?
A: Probably with mathematics, reading, and science in primary grades. A sufficient number of mobile PC software exists to test the Decisive Schools concept. More are under development.
Q: Does anyone want a Decisive School?
A: Probably. Decisive Schools offer accelerated learning and lower risks of failure. Many educators and community members want to see those results from schools.
Let’s identify people interested in creating a Decisive School. Now, they exist either as vague concepts, as partial programs in schools or in literature about earlier deployments.
Q: Why should a school rely on a business to design Decisive School databases? Can’t educators develop databases for schools?
A: Schools assist students to learn specific content. That’s their specialty. Businesses develop tools for educators and students to use to meet education goals. Product and tool development as well as distribution are business specialties.
Q: What questions have I not asked that I should ask about Decisive Schools?
A: One question is, “What will happen if no one develops a school that uses decision theory with advanced mobile technologies to assist teachers arrange instruction?”
An answer, if no one does, then the concept of Decisive Schools remains a reference against which other school performances can be compared. Probably, someone will develop a Decisive School or something similar enough to test the value of formalizing decision theory and management to supplement teacher professional judgment.
* This fictitious Q & A and venue are products of my imagination, except for the names of the city and state, and references to technologies and literature. I use fiction to explain further the concept of Decisive Schools, and to anticipate likely questions among people who discuss using decision theory and management to accelerate learning. Bob Heiny