Research base

Some research: Why should we improve communications in public education?

Notes by Mica Pollock

It’s a new thing for me to share thoughts in progress online. I'm used to writing books that take years. But it seems weird to do that on a project about technology and education! So, here are some ideas I've been chewing on as PI of the OneVille Project.

You could say that OneVille's work is rooted in antiracism, or progressivism. We believe in tapping the potential of every child who shares a diverse community. We believe in community collaboration in young people's success.

But we have been working specifically on concrete projects improving everyday communications in our diverse community. Why?

Here's the logic: If we can’t communicate successfully in public school communities, we can’t collaborate successfully in student success.

Look at the image above. These are some of the people whose everyday actions affect young people's fates. If the teacher doesn't hear from "Jose" about what he likes to learn, can she successfully support him? If the parent doesn't hear from administrator what the afterschool opportunities are for Jose, can the parent successfully partner in Jose's success? Research shows that all of those people have important things to say and contribute, that the others need to hear (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005).

And substantial research shows that to partner in students’ development, these people need to communicate regularly about students’ progress, interests, and experiences, and about available resources, with the goal of supporting young people's full potential (Ferguson 2008).

More specifically, we know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers and peers on their work (e.g., Hattie 2008); teachers teach better when youth, other teachers, and administrators offer feedback on improving their teaching (Jones and Yonezawa 2008/2009; Daly et al 2010; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009; Boudett et al 2005); parents and teachers support children’s progress better when they communicate about children’s activity in the other setting (Taveras et al 2010; González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Lawrence-Lightfoot 2003). Families, youth, and teachers tap local resources better when they talk about what’s available (Mickelson and Cousins 2008). Service providers who share regions are realizing that supporting their own routine communication is key to partnership – in Somerville, the SomerPromise collaborative is that example (http://www.strivetogether.org/).

Research on data-driven decision-making (Boudett et al 2005), family and community engagement (Mediratta et al 2009, Oakes and Rogers 2006; Henderson et al 2007), and youth engagement, mentoring, and "personalization" (Yonezawa, McClure and Jones forthcoming; Grossman and Bulle 2006) all suggests that when students’ supporters communicate regularly about things the others don’t know but need to know, they are each more equipped to attend to students’ life experiences, to intervene rapidly to reduce moments of failure and reinforce moments of success, and to offer resources available to help. So, supporting regular communication between current and potential partners is key to improving today’s schools.

So, here’s what I’ve learned on the OneVille Project: adding ‘’’infrastructure’’’ helping people communicate (an eportfolio; a multilingual coffee hour; a parent hotline; texting) is like adding new tunnels connecting people. For example, Somerville High School is now encouraging students to communicate examples of their skills, interests, and talents via eportfolios. Before eportfolios, portfolios were just a folder of five paragraph essays kept in a locked cabinet. With the old infrastructure, students could communicate far less about who they were and what they could do. As teacher Chris Glynn put it, even a student looking at her own work regularly was a "100% increase in audience"! Teachers and students have seeded new infrastructure for communicating about students’ skills and interests as a normal thing to do at Somerville High.

But it's not just about adding new "tools": It's become really clear that a tech tool is only one aspect of communication infrastructure. The eportfolio students and teachers made clear that people have to talk to a young person face to face, encourage him/her to share skills and to present "her best" to a caring audience, and allow time (and for some, training) to make eportfolio entries using tech. Then great entries go up on an eportfolio! That means that people also have to ‘’care about student success’’ enough to communicate about it.

But, I've been seeing that communicating about student success can lead to relationships, and relationships can lead to communicating more about student success. If you post a resource about camp or enrichment opportunities on a listserv for other parents on a listserv, it makes parents more likely to post the next one. After teachers saw student skills on their eportfolios, they began to praise students for those skills, and to communicate about jobs, internships, and more.

So, to partner in young people’s success, people need tools and strategies helping them to communicate about the individual children they share (What does Jose love to learn? How is he doing on credits toward graduation?); about the classrooms they share (what’s the homework? Who has an idea on the assignment?), about the schools they share (what afterschool opportunities are available for children? What actions would improve the school?), and about the community they share (where’s the free science fair? How might we improve education here?).

Supporting young people requires a combination of ‘’’channels’’’ -- ‘’’face to face’’’ communications (like a parent-teacher meeting, an afterschool discussion between student and teacher, or a parent coffee hour where people share information and build relationships), ‘’’paper’’’ communications (like a handout in a backpack, a sign on the wall informing a parent of an opportunity, or a copy of student work at a parent-teacher conference), and ‘’’electronic’’’ communications (like a student checking her grades online or a parent posting a local resource on a school listserv).

I've also been thinking that public school communications particularly require seeding infrastructure for the following ‘’’necessary communications’’’:

‘Ready and reliable’ information on basic indicators of student progress and service (like we tried to offer with the dashboard project); '’'Robust'’' (rather than shallow) information on each young person’s full range of skills, talents, and interests (like the Somerville High eportfolio project succeeded in seeding); ’Rapid’ information on youths’ personal development and well-being (core to Full Circle/Next Wave's pioneering of texting) '’'Far-reaching'’' (rather than exclusive to some) information about public resources, events, and opportunities, and public ideas, circulated to all across lines of language, race/ethnicity, income, and tech literacy (like the Healey School's Parent Connector Network effort).

We could do more in public education to test specific tools and strategies, to see when "adding tech" supports such necessary communications and when it doesn't.

It seems pretty clear that the communication infrastructure of partnership in public education is pretty underdeveloped, in an era when commonplace and free technology could make necessary communication and information-sharing in education easier than ever.

Last ideas: we speak often of students “falling through the cracks” in education, which implies a momentary gap in a human network of information-sharing, relationship, and response. I think it's more accurate to speak of ‘’’structural cracks’’’ -- communication barriers that routinely block people from knowing and sharing necessary information. Think of rare face to face support team meetings, backpack fliers in English in multilingual schools, and paper portfolios kept in inaccessible cabinets: each communication habit fails to enable supporters to communicate in necessary ways (or in a timely manner) about supporting young people.

Examples of structural cracks in education’s communication infrastructure abound: across the country, many administrators serving low-income children remain unable to quickly show parents or teachers basic data on students. Reliant on rare face-to-face meetings that are hard to schedule, many overloaded teachers and afterschool providers rarely communicate about what students need to work on. Due to translation barriers, many immigrant parents remain unaware of educational opportunities available in their schools or community. Many students and teachers rarely exchange information on how students are doing personally or what they love to learn – even as youth of all social groups communicate constantly about both via tech outside of school (see, e.g., Ito et al, 2008: Watkins 2009; Noveck 2009; Shirky 2006; Taveras et al 2010; Mickelson and Cousins 2008).

Some schools and districts are investing in expensive technology for information-sharing between partners. We've wanted to test the potential of free and commonplace technology and low-cost communication strategies for supporting diverse partners in young people’s lives to collaborate. And, we've wanted to do this in collaboration with diverse educators, youth, families, and local technologists. Too often, tech tools and projects rain down on teachers, youth and families. Involving them in the design makes it way more likely to enable communications people need and want to have!

So, we’ve been working to test -- and then, only when necessary, try to create -- free, open-source, and low-cost tools and strategies for linking diverse partners in desired communications across lines of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. So far, we’ve built new tools only when we found no free tool available to test (our dashboards and hotline -- while the hotline was made quickly by an experienced technologist, the dashboard project has made me think hard about developing really complex tools from scratch). We've also been testing existing free tools, to see how they can help link diverse partners. We’ve tested Google Voice in our texting pilot, and tested Google Translate, Googledocs, Google spreadsheets, and Gmail in our schoolwide communication efforts. Students and teachers tested Googlesites in our ePortfolio pilot, as well as Wikispaces and Posterous, and we’ve used Wordpress to blog out and Mediawiki to organize our ideas for this website!

I only started thinking about tech’s role in education in 2009. It's clear to me now that commonplace tech a) helps communities connect when they can't meet face to face. A listserv, hotline, or Googleform can help people quickly share information with many people at once. People can quickly access and sort online data in a way they can’t do with paper folders. With technology, supportive information can come at faster speeds: paper report cards come three times a year or study teams meet once a month, but tech can make even daily check-ins about and with a young person possible. But tech also b) allows info to come in more forms: Posted photos and videos can show a young person’s or teacher’s accomplishments in a way that test scores and grades alone can’t. And tech also c) makes collaboration -- the holy grail of improving schools! -- more possible. When you include people with important knowledge in the conversation, many hands can make lighter work. As Clay Shirky puts it of social media generally, "here comes everybody" – that is, if you translate information, show people how to use technology, and invite/encourage everyone’s participation.

While testing technologies, we are also figuring out ways to tap local people power more efficiently in communication efforts. For example, bilingual parents have been figuring out how they, as volunteers, might be willing to make monthly calls to other immigrant parents as “Connectors” or translate key info from a Googleform onto a hotline.

We've also been making the case for better and more available hardware and internet access in public schools too.

I've been calling all this work "improving the communication infrastructure of public education." That's because we're seeing that if you embed free/low cost communication tools and strategies in schools and communities, with the goal of supporting the success of every student, you can make it more normal for the partnerships you want, to happen. To me, improving communication infrastructure means working to ensure that on a daily basis, the people who need to communicate information and ideas so they can collaborate in young people’s success can do it.