Steve Kinney is an instructional technology specialist and web designer from Hoboken, NJ. You can also find him on Twitter and LinkedIn—if you're so inclined. If you're really interested in learning more about him, then we (the royal we, that is) humbly suggest clicking here.

Can something as simple as rearranging a school’s schedule have a profound impact on student success? According to an article printed recently in The New York Times, it can.

Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess — sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.

I won’t regurgitate the content here; it’s worth reading. There are a few cool things going on in this article. First, schools who have shifted recess before lunch have all noticed the same phenomenon: meteoric improvement is possible through relatively small changes to the status quo.

There is another part that I want to draw your attention, however. The article repeatedly mentions how wasted food was cut down, instructional time was added, and student disruptiveness was down. The schools profiled in this article are using data effectively. They’re not just collecting binders and binders of data. These schools came up with a hypothesis, tested their hypothesis, and measured the results. It’s the scientific method.

A lot of schools just collect data for the sake of collecting data—without an actual goal in mind. They believe that storing massive amounts of these records will drive their instruction. Blindly collecting data, is taxing on teachers and administrators and ultimately more likely to overwhelm them. Data are exponentially more effective when their be used for a targeted purpose.

If you read enough news, you’ll eventually come across an opinion piece complaining that what we need is more innovators. For the most part, the author is right. We’re not going to get ourselves out of this mess through more financial wizardry. That’s just smoke and mirrors. We are most likely going to have to create our way out of it.

Are our schools set up to encourage the kind of innovators we’re looking for? There is relatively little correlation between schooling and innovation. Alberta Einstein did poorly in school. Thomas Edison’s teachers considered him to be a “dull student.” Henry Ford once quipped, “You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.” Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out of college. That being said, Jobs is—more often than not—the defacto dropped name of choice.

School doesn’t encourage you to innovate. It discourages it. For years, our economy depended on workers to follow directions and obey authority. As a result, our schools were set up accordingly. It worked great for about a century and a half following the Industrial Revolution.

The problem is that the nature of our economy has radically shifted. Over the last half-century, factories have been moved overseas. More recently, knowledge work (e.g. programming and accounting) have been following a similar trend. The rest has been either automated or made ubiquitous via the Internet. Anything that doesn’t involve a substantial amount of creativity can be had on the cheap.

I can get a boiler plate contract from LegalZoom. I don’t need to hire a lawyer for such a rudimentary task. Creative lawyers will still be in demand, but mediocre lawyers will lose their bread and butter. As Dan Pink explained in A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, if it can be outsourced or automated, it will be. Good thing we have an educational system that rewards mediocrity over creativity.

On January 24, Thomas Friedman wrote:

We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

It’s a noble goal to be sure and I completely agree with Friedman, but it’s all empty rhetoric until we initiate policy changes that integrate creative, twenty-first century thinking into the classroom. Sure, there are incredible teachers strewn across our nation. And yes, there are initiatives in some districts dedicated to training teachers to become incredible. But, it doesn’t scale and it won’t be enough. We must consider the world around us and then take a good, hard look at our educational system and bridge the gulf between our classrooms and the real world. Public schools have the potential to create the innovators and leaders of tomorrow, but only if they change with the times.

The iPad and the Problem With Technology in Education

January 29, 2010

We’re at the point where the tools to change education has been around for years. Another shiny, new device is not going to be the key to unlocking a model of education that reflects the demands of the twenty-first century. The tools are available, now we’ve got to sit down and do the grunt work—the work we keep putting off every time a new toy gets announced. It involves policy change. It involves innovation. Most of all, it involves a whole lot of hard work.

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Differentiating Instruction Using Technology

January 20, 2010

Differentiated instruction has been around for about a century. It’s not that no one thought it was a good idea until recently. It’s that it just wasn’t feasible within the industrial model of education. You know the one I’m talking about—30 students, one teacher. Unless you’re prepared to churn through teachers at a steady rate, [...]

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What Makes a Great Teacher?

January 11, 2010

The Atlantic published an interesting article by Amanda Ripley regarding Teach for America and The New Teacher Project’s massive collection of data on what makes an effective teacher in the contemporary classroom. Highly recommended.

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Getting Kids Ready to Do Creative Work

December 15, 2009

It’s like Merlin always says, “You can’t run a marathon your first day off the couch.” (There is a lot of paraphrasing going on there.) Doing really meaningful, creative work takes a lot of time, patience, and practice. Gosh, if only there was kind of place where people—preferably of a young age—could practice at creating really exciting things in a low-risk environment. School is a particularly good place to get some of this practice in.

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The iPod Touch as a Portable Digital Media Hub

December 8, 2009

When Apple introduced the iMac, they billed it as a digital media hub. That’s the whole idea behind iLife—your digital life. The iPhone and iPod touch are posed to become portable digital media hubs and the implications for education are huge.

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Who Needs Mathematicians for Math, Anyway?

December 8, 2009

The City Journal recently printed an essay on the fact that we give working mathematicians very little say in how we design our math curriculum and then wonder why we’re not particularly effective at educating our students in math.

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Professors Avoid SMART Boards

September 13, 2009

Some Yale professors are giving up on SMART Boards. They claim that the boards often cause more problems than they solve.

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Stanford Study: Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price

September 9, 2009

We’re not built for multitasking and anyone who tells you they are is lying to you—and there are some really smart people at Stanford who’d like to prove that to you.

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