Adversary, a new book by Kevin R. Glover

How do we explain to a child why a loving God allows bad things to happen to good people? How can a child make sense of a world permeated by evil and a loving all-powerful Creator? The Adversary, A Christian illustrated novel, addresses these questions by helping middle graders better understand the epic struggle between good and evil throughout biblical history

The major events of the Old and New Testaments are told by Obsessious, a small black, adolescent, celestial spirit who is ostracized by most of the other angels and archangels in heaven when God creates the first earth. Obsessious is drawn to Lucifer, God’s prince on earth, who pays attention to the lonely little angel by assigning him menial tasks. When Lucifer tries to overthrow God, he and the angels who stand with him, including Obsessious, are banished to a dark and ruined earth before Adam and Eve.

After God reforms the ruined earth, and creates man, Lucifer becomes increasingly unbalanced while trying to undermine the worldlings and retain his power. Children struggling with trying to understand their own “dark” sides will find a sympathetic character in Obsessious, who slowly regrets the bad decision he made to follow Lucifer instead of God. Obsessious fears his master and soon realizes that Lucifer’s war with God can never be won. He desperately wants to escape Lucifer, but lacks the courage to do so until he listens to Jesus and slowly understands the meaning of His parables. While Lucifer and his rogue angels seek to destroy God’s Son, Obsessious seeks and finds his own redemption.

Adversary is available at: http://www.lulu.com/ (search adversary, glover)
Adversary will be available soon at Amazon and Barnes and Noble

TLT 471 TQ#4: Is the MFA the new MBA or is the future owned by MSMAs?

Andy Grove has been credited with the motto that, “Only the paranoid survive.” Tom Middleton, my very first real boss told me repeatedly me as a young salesman that everyone was my competition. I was selling pharmaceuticals at the time to general practitioners in Southeastern Ohio. Tom’s message was that I wasn’t just competing with other pharmaceutical salesman for quality face time with the doctor. He meant that I was also competing with everything else and everybody else who was vying for the doctor’s attention including the copier salesman, the office supply salesman, his wife, his kids, his patients and every transient thought or stomach grumble that might divert his availability, time and attention away from me. As a very impressionable young man at twenty-two, I learned early in my career that differentiation is the key to success. In addition, I learned that differentiation is often short-lived so a commitment to a life-long learning process was required to continuously broaden my skill set to always expand my ability to make personal and professional choices.

Daniel Pink suggests, in A Whole New Mind, that right-brained aptitudes will be more difficult to replicate in the new conceptual age. He argues that as information becomes more widely disseminated, and as products become cheaper and more abundant, due to the rise of the Asian knowledge worker and automation, it all becomes less valuable. He argues that the people who will thrive in this new era are those who can make sense of this often superficial, mass-manufactured, data-based tsunami by taking the data and communicating it with emotional impact in a way that is relevant to those they seek to influence. Pink’s fundamental argument is to differentiate oneself.

I’ve been creating and using stories for years now to differentiate myself from “competitors.” I use these stories in presentations, lectures, and in follow up correspondence, which includes these stories as well as hand written notes. I use these story cards (pictured above) to motivate, inspire and teach. The return on this investment of creating, producing and physically sending these cards out has proven itself well beyond anything I could have every achieved with an email message. I have “overcome modern life’s glut of options and stimuli” with mini-symphonies of story, art and personal investment that is not easily replicated by others. This act of creating what some would consider a low tech communication piece was only possible with modern technology - digital cameras, scanners, Abobe InDesign and Photoshop, and HP inkjet printers, which can produce inexpensive, high quality cards in low volumes. So, is this act of differentiation a left-brained (MS) or right-brained (MA) process? I argue both.

Ray Kurzweil suggests, in The Singularity is Near, that humans will be forced to merge with their created machines since the exponential growth in non-biological computing power will far outstrip our lame processing speeds. He foresees a future in which humans and machines will ultimately evolve together. His predictions that at some point the machine itself becomes “self-aware” and is able to independently become a creator itself is a truly frightening prospect. Perhaps I’ve seen too many science fiction movies, but I don’t buy his argument that this machine “intelligence that arises from the singularity will have great respect for their biological heritage.” In the evolutionary processes that Kurzweil so eloquently describes I don’t see where a “survival of the fittest” end game doesn’t play itself out – but I’m only through 100 pages of the book so far so I’ll reserve judgment. The one thing that I do believe is that the exponential hockey stick of technological innovation is inevitable and only those who endeavor to learn about and use it will be able to leverage the new tools to differentiate themselves in the new conceptual age. Even though I fear where we may let technology take us I tend to be an early adopter of technology – always seeking for ways to give myself an edge over my competition. I learned word processing and how to make electronic spreadsheets on a Commodore 64 machine. I bought a $1,300 mobile “bag” phone. I did these things to be able to address my customer’s issues and concerns faster. Through technological solutions I could be the first to empathize with their fear, uncertainty and doubt. So, was this act of differentiation a left-brained (MS) or right-brained (MA) process? I argue both.

For me the focus of education now and into the future should be to facilitate and encourage student creation of all kinds to reinforce this notion of differentiation for competitive advantage. The act of creation with and without technology is an experiential learning process that leads to the real application of knowledge and a life-long love for learning.

TLT 471 TQ#3: Was our assignment really a tech plan?

I have been struggling with this notion of technology as an educational solution ever since I joined the LST MS program in 2005. As has been noted in most of the research we have read this semester, a “slapped on” technological solution of any kind that is not integrated into the core curriculum, typically does not yield anticipated learning outcomes. So I have approached this project as an educational intervention which happens to include a robust technology component. As such, my part 1 assessment of the target audience’s current state is more focused on offering a compelling argument to convince them that they have a problem, which at present they don’t see.

My “school district” is a typical average hospital. My hypothesis is that a comprehensive nursing peripheral IV catheter (PIVC) procedure training curriculum, which includes deliberate, increasingly difficult practice with task-based simulators, and human factors simulation, will ultimately reduce the number of peripheral IV catheter (PIVC) insertion attempts and the length of the PIVC procedure resulting in less adverse events like pain, phlebitis, infiltration and infection.

The need to build this compelling argument was discovered after researching many new hire nursing orientation programs. New nurse graduates (who have usually received no previous training in the PIVC procedure) receive 15-60 minutes of venipuncture procedural skills training in a classroom setting. During this brief training, they received a didactic lecture that reviews the the hospital's venipuncture procedure (checklist) and the classroom instructor models the procedure with a simulated prosthetic plastic arm. The instructor is often a nurse who is not certified in the venipuncture procedure. The full capabilities of the prosthetic simulation arm are typically not used during the training presentation and quite often the procedural instructions given are not up to date with current Infusion Nursing Society guidelines. Student practice on the prosthetic plastic arm during the classroom training is also usually voluntary. After this orientation, most new hire nurses are matched with hospital unit preceptors who are responsible for validating the new hire nurse’s PIVC procedure competency. Preceptors are usually not certified PIVC procedure practitioners nor has their procedural competency been validated or assessed before taking on the preceptor role. Typically, there are no formal new hire nurse PIVC competency criteria, no number of procedures required, and no summative assessments. Usually, these non-certified preceptors subjectively determine when new hire nurses can do the PIVC procedure competently based upon their own individual requirements.

Even though program instructors often recognize deficiencies in the PIVC training component of new hire nurse orientation resources are always limited and they often feel that their executive administrators will not see any value in freeing up additional PIVC instructional time. Since increased instructional time with a new mastery learning technology-based curriculum is needed to test our hypothesis, my “current state” assignment needs to include a review of these typical existing instructional issues. I needed to make credible predictions of patient risk associated with current instructional practices. Unless potential gaps are clearly identified and agreed to by all key stakeholders in any hospital I have no hope of selling them on the vision of a better mastery learning technology-based curriculum or its subsequent implementation.

TLT 471. TQ#2. “A Perfect Storm of Mindlessness”(1)

As an indentured investor in the public school system of this country, all I can do is express my absolute dismay after reading the US Department of Education’s two executive summaries assigned this week. (2,3) Unfortunately, individually I lack the power to redirect the juggernaut of academic “mindlessness” expressed in the research that was reviewed in these two summaries. But perhaps, collectively, we can influence future efforts to improve student outcomes by demanding revolutionary change around the following four key initiatives.

• Meaningful accountability for educational leaders and classroom teachers
• The blended integration of technology into the curriculum
• Focused experiential learning through problem solving that requires significant effort
• A student assessment strategy that measures relevant knowledge application

Given the time, effort and money it took to execute the Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products research, I find it absurd that school principals and classroom teachers were “encouraged” by vendors to use the software products under investigation, but teachers could arbitrarily decide not to do so. Once recruited for the study, school districts top down, from the superintendent to the classroom teacher, should have been required to utilize the software – otherwise, why bother conducting the research at all? The ability of individual teachers in the intervention group to opt out “whenever” is a major flaw of this study, but consistent with Wenglinsky’s observation that a culture of learning is not valued and nourished in many school environments in which many teachers are indifferent and educational leadership is absent.(1) In my view teacher indifference won’t be eradicated until there is truly meaningful accountability for lack of performance. If optimal student performance isn’t evident, opting out of trying new methodologies should not be an option. School districts should be able to quickly remove any principal or teacher (regardless of tenure) who “opts out” of trying potentially new methodologies if the students they are tasked to teach are substandard performers.

The reading and mathematics software products used in this research were essentially drill and practice tutorials that supplemented the teacher and were not an integrated part of the curriculum. In addition, the software under investigation was used by the students less than 11% of the allocated and applicable instructional time. As a fervent believer in Ericsson’s deliberate practice methodology, I am not surprised that instructional interventions used less than 11% of the time result in no statistically significant change in student achievement.(4) There was no significant investment in either time or effort to truly test the potential impact of these software programs. In addition, these software programs did not seem to add any depth to the existing curriculum. I imagine that these drill and practice software programs probably replaced drill and practice print-based work sheets. Wenglinsky suggests that technology like this should never stand alone. He advocates a blended integration of technology into the curriculum that leverages multiple tools. His view is that technology should be imbedded and inseparable from creative teaching that has students spending significantly more time on less. He refers to one such creative teacher who said, “I would rather have my students spend an entire period on one problem, coming up with multiple ways of solving it, many of them dead ends, than have them solve 15 problems without engaging their brains.” (1)

This last comment leads us to the subject of attention and the fact that the temporary memory of our students is fleeting. Limited temporary memory capacity leaves us with students who selectively choose to attend to certain incoming information while simultaneously choosing to ignore other information. Selective attention is the only way that instruction reaches conscious thought. Wenglinsky, Driscoll, and Linn et al advocate student-centric instructional content that is presented in ways that are personnally meaningful or aligned in some way to student’s existing concepts or anchoring ideas (certainly not drill and practice software programs used in isolation). When a student’s existing long term cognitive files are connected in meaningful ways instruction being processed in short term memory will be relevant to the student and provide entry points for the new information to be permentantly filed, or encoded for later recall and application. When students encounter content that is not student-centric (drill and practice programs used in isolation) they are more apt to reherse or memorize the new ideas. Since these isolated, rehersed new ideas are not connected to existing ideas the instruction results in little to no cumulative learning and rapid forgetting. Using technology that is an integrated part of a curriculum, which is directed towards student-centric, relevant, experiential and demanding problem solving will increase their knowledge acquisition and application around more focused content.(1,4,5,and 6)

Finally, standardized tests that measure isolated student knowledge acquisition is just as uninteresting and irrelevant to students as the curricular content and teaching methodologies that they are forced to endure in most classrooms. The drill and practice software programs described in the IES executive summaries were certainly not interesting nor were they personally relevant to the students in these study populations. The software programs did not require any meaningful effort. These programs did not immerse students in an experiential and demanding problem solving process, and yet the IES embarks on this study expecting a lame standardized test to validate a lamely executed technology intervention. Nothing will improve in our public schools until we demand a student assessment strategy that measures relevant knowledge application. Performance assessments need to replace standardized multiple choice knowledge assessments because at the end of the day what students know is irrelevant – what students can do is everything. (1) A student may have memorized an extensive vocabulary (knowledge), but can he or she leverage that knowledge by articulating a compelling and persuasive argument in writing (applied knowledge)?

There are voices crying in the wilderness who are advocating the revolutionary changes reviewed here. For example, Professor Robert Sternberg’s alternative SAT (Rainbow Project) is more focused on having students describe their solutions to relevant problems than answer multiple choice knowledge assessment questions. Even though it has been shown to be twice as successful than the traditional SAT in predicting how well students will perform in college it has not been adopted (Pink, 2005).(7) And even though the SAT introduced a writing component to their multiple choice test in 2005 it is still not being used by most colleges in the evaluation of student applicants. Although I applaud the efforts of pioneers like Dr. Sternberg, I wonder if revolutionary change can ever happen when we can’t even adopt a small incremental improvement to student assessment like writing an essay on the SAT.

The Chinese characters at the beginning of this blog are translated as “Fu bu guo san dai”, or “wealth only lasts three generations.” The proverb is often expressed when discussing the United States because the Chinese believe that we lack the determination and discipline to fundamentally change any of the challenges described above.

Are they right?


References

1. Wenglinsky H. (2005) Using Technology Wisely: The Keys to Success in Schools. Teachers College Press. Columbia University. New York. pp. 43-59
2. Institute of Educational Sciences (2007) Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort. Executive Summary. US Department of Education. Washington, DC.
3. Institute of Educational Sciences (2008) Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report. Executive Summary. US Department of Education. Washington, DC.
4. Ericsson K.A. (2004). Deliberate practice and acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and related domains. Academic Medicine. Vol. 79, No.10:S70-S81.
5. Discoll, M.P. (2005) Psychology of learning for instruction (Third edition). pp. 111-152: Pearson Education, Inc
6. Linn, M.C., Davis, E.A., & Eylons, B-S. (2004). The scaffolded knowledge integration framework for instruction. In M.C. Linn, E.A. Davis, & P. Bell (Eds.), Internet environments for science education (pp. 47-72). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
7. Pink D.H. (2005) A Whole New Mind. Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Riverhead Books. New York. pp. 39