Bill Kerr’s post triggered some thinking related to education and curriculum design. Asking what sort of computer interface is suitable for learning, Bill said

We have become very used to a certain style of user interface, one which is “user friendly” and which gives us access to the function of the computer. The user friendly user interface has been designed by experts to not demand too much of the end user. Some systems take this a step further and actively discourage the user from becoming curious about how things work under the hood.

I see an analogy between the computer GUI and the textbook, the user interface for curriculum. The textbook “has been designed by experts to not demand too much of the end user.” In the case of scripted curricula, “Some systems take this a step further and actively discourage the end user from becoming curious about how things work under the hood.” See my thinking, here? In the last 15 years, textbooks have become massively complex “systems” with supplementary materials and teacher manuals that you need a wheelbarrow to cart around.

Bill points out that commercialization defines the application for the sake of marketability. Because large publishers target their products at the largest adopters, the curricula of California, Texas, and Florida become the de facto curriculum for everyone else. Bill makes a case for the computer user to become a constructionist designer who participates in the construction of their own tools. He recommends an object oriented programming approach that would blur the boundaries between tool and medium.

I think this would be a great idea for curriculum and assessment as well. Going back to my earlier post about the philosophical and theoretical base for curriculum design, teachers, parents, and students will need to become critical consumers of what are more and more called “solutions and services” to educational needs. Or, like consumers of any commercial product, we can expect to continue working with the design problems we inherit from ill-fitting ready-made programs.

Mostly, I find that teachers have to re-engineer everything before we can use it. The math book doesn’t have enough practice work. The social studies book doesn’t have enough hands-on projects. So we supplement. I see this as wasteful. We pay a lot of money for stuff that doesn’t quite suit the need. What’s needed is time and resources that allow us to begin actively participating in design work starting from a framework defined by standards. We have to become experts in more that just pedagogy. Content and historical knowledge in the academic disciplines is also necessary.

This isn’t the trend, though. What I see is something more like Edgar Schein’s coercive persuasion, which he points out is something that “can be used equally for goals that we deplore and goals that we accept.” Coercive persuasion, he says, is “…comparable to what it feels like to an employee or manager when they are told that the way they have worked for decades is no longer adequate and that they will have to learn some completely new concepts and skills in order to retain their jobs.” From an educational perspective, Schein’s article on Kurt Lewin’s change theory is worth a look. I especially liked this use of a medical metaphor:

If Lewin was correct that one cannot understand an organization without trying to change it, how is it possible to make an adequate diagnosis without intervening? So either consultants using the classical model are getting an incorrect picture of the organization, or they are intervening but are denying it by labeling it “just diagnosis.” Isn’t a better initial model of work with organizations something like the stress test that the cardiologist performs by putting the heart under pressure to see how it will perform, even knowing that there are some risks and that some people have been hurt during the test itself? This risk forces the diagnostician to think about the nature of the “diagnostic intervention” and to apply clinical criteria for what is safe, rather than purely scientific criteria of what would seemingly give the most definitive answer.

As the privatization and school improvement industry ramps up, everyone needs to think about the assumptions embedded in what’s being presented. Whenever an edublogger starts talking about organizational change, as I have here, my brain glazes over with the futility of the mere suggestion. So, please excuse me. What I propose is that the “end users” begin to recognize the persuasive techniques that are being used to marshal support for various recommendations, and to feel free to stick an oar in the water every now and then as the opportunity arises to make something good happen, or to learn something that nobody else can tell us. For me teaching is a form of inquiry.