Research base

Research Base: Why should we improve the communication infrastructure of public education?

Notes by Mica Pollock

If we can’t communicate successfully in public school communities, we can’t collaborate successfully either. Substantial research shows that to partner in students’ development, key supporters in young people’s lives need to communicate regularly about students’ progress, interests, and experiences, and about available resources. More specifically, we know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers on their classroom performance (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). Nonprofits who share regions are realizing that supporting their own routine communication is key to partnership (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 and mentoring (Yonezawa, Jones and McLure 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.

We might say that three major factors affect educational communications today: a lack of resources and time (e.g., Torlakson 2011), a need to integrate diverse educators, families, and students in a common enterprise (Author 2008a, b), and the explosion of commonplace and free technology, now used by millions of diverse Americans to communicate outside of school (Watkins 2009). So how might that low-cost and commonplace technology, employed in the daily operations of diverse public school communities, help link partners in rapid communications about supporting young people? How might such communications be shaped purposefully to link partners across lines of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy? In the OneVille Project, we have begun to test ways to employ commonplace tech tools (and free, open source technologies) for routinely connecting the people who share a diverse educational community.

Lots of research shows that if people have a "high expectations, high help" frame of mind about doing what it takes to support young people's full potential (Ferguson 2008), students do better when the key people in their lives communicate about how they are doing and what they can do -- and about the resources available to help.

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 city they share (where’s the free science fair? How might we improve education here?).

Finally, supporting young people requires a combination of 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), print 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).

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

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. More accurate is 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 education’s antiquated communication infrastructure abound: across the country, many administrators serving low-income children remain unable to quickly show parents or teachers basic patterns affecting students, because they can’t afford the cutting-edge software to do it. 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).

Wealthy 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 technologists.

So, we’ve been working to test -- and then, as necessary, 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. Our goal has become to hone, over time and in collaboration with folks elsewhere, a toolkit of such tools and strategies enabling diverse supporters to collaborate in student success. We've been doing this through participatory design research, which involves a group of people trying to solve a problem, figuring out what needs to happen next, and redirecting work toward success.

So far, we’ve built new tools only when we found no free tool available to test (our dashboards and hotline). 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 modified it to afford one-to-many texting). We’ve tested Google Translate, Googledocs, Google spreadsheets, and Gmail in our schoolwide toolkit. We’ve tested Googlesites in our ePortfolio pilot, as well as Wikispaces, and we’ve used Wordpress to blog out and Mediawiki to organize our ideas for this website!

While testing technologies, we are also figuring out ways to tap local people power more efficiently. 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 training more people to use the technology around them (the ePortfolio project is a great example) and, making the case for better and more available hardware and internet access in public schools too.

I've been calling all this "improving the communication infrastructure of public education." Our goal now is to connect with people doing similar work in other places.

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. 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. 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. And when you include people with important knowledge in the conversation, many hands make lighter work. As Clay Shirky puts it of social media generally, "here comes everybody"!

So, we now have the ability to move beyond rare support team meetings, one-way fliers in backpacks, and paper portfolios kept in inaccessible cabinets, to supporters able to communicate far more easily to support young people at any time. That's what we mean by "improving the communication infrastructure of public education."