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 agonizing over books that take years. But it seems weird to do that on a project about technology, education, and rapid communication! 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, or a vision of community cooperation. 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. Research shows that IF these people have students' success in mind, all of those people have important things to say and contribute, that the others need to hear (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005). If they want to support young people but can't communicate things the others need to know, I'd call this a crack in the foundation of their partnership.

For example, let's say the teacher never hears much from "Jose" about what he likes to learn, or about things he thinks he is good at. Can she successfully support him? I don't think so. How about if she knows he loves science, but never hears from afterschool provider about a free science fair in the community? I'd say there's a crack in the foundation of their partnership.

If the parent doesn't hear from administrator what the afterschool opportunities are for Jose, can the parent successfully partner in Jose's success?

If the tutor doesn't hear from teacher what young Jose needs to work on, can she tutor him as effectively?

Substantial research shows that to partner in students’ development, Jose and his supporters need to communicate regularly about his progress, interests, and experiences, and about available resources -- with the goal of supporting his full potential (Ferguson 2008). Just communicating "more" about Jose's flaws or failures, or his parents' or teachers', won't support him; communicating about his strengths and struggles and available resources, in the spirit of supporting his success, will.

More specifically, we know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers and peers on improving 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 communicating about improving their own work collectively is key to partnership (http://www.strivetogether.org/). On such efforts in Somerville, google the SomerPromise collaborative.

Actually, all of the hot things we want to do in education require better communications: research on data-driven decision-making shows we need to communicate better about student data; (Boudett et al 2005), research on family and community engagement shows schools need to communicate better with families; (Mediratta et al 2009, Oakes and Rogers 2006; Henderson et al 2007), research on authentic assessment shows that students need vehicles for communicating what they can actually do (Darling-Hammond and Pecheone 2010), and research on youth engagement, mentoring, and "personalization" shows that students and supporters need ways to communicate rapidly about how young people are doing personally (Yonezawa, McClure and Jones forthcoming; Grossman and Bulle 2006).

All this research 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 -- with the goal of supporting students' full talent development -- is key to improving today’s schools.

So, here’s what I’ve personally been seeing on the OneVille Project: adding ‘’’infrastructure’’’ -- embedded tools and strategies prompting people to communicate (an eportfolio; a multilingual coffee hour; a parent hotline; texting) is like adding new tunnels or roads connecting people.

For example, Somerville High School teachers used to create portfolios for students that were just a folder of five paragraph essays kept in a locked cabinet. SHS is now encouraging students to communicate examples of their skills, interests, and talents via eportfolios. With the old infrastructure, students could communicate far less about who they were and what they could do. Teachers and students have seeded new infrastructure for communicating about students’ skills and interests as a normal thing to do at Somerville High. Basically, teachers and students built a new road for communication! I call that "communication infrastructure."

Human beings need to shape communication ON tools, though: an eportfolio is just a blank page, after all. Students and teachers could send anything over text message! Eportfolio teachers had 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) for students to make eportfolio entries using tech. Then students put great entries on their eportfolios. Teachers had to send small caring messages to young people encouraging them to talk whenever needed; then students began to use the channel to discuss a range of student support issues and in the process, solidified their relationships to teachers and school.

All 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 (a caring text makes you text back!), and relationships can lead to communicating more about student success. If you post a resource about a free science fair on a listserv for other parents, it makes the next parent more likely to post another resource. After teachers saw one student's poem and another student's drawings on their eportfolios, they began to praise students for those skills, students shared more, and both kept communicating about jobs, internships, and more.

But people can post meanness on a listserv and send a rude text; the overall underlying point of communication in school is to have student success in mind when you do it!

So, to partner in young people’s success, people need tools and strategies helping them to communicate about supporting 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 supporting youth across the community they share (where’s the free science fair? How might we improve education here?).

Supporting young people also 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). Our challenge in public education today is to figure out what "blend" of channels enables the most effective youth support.

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 (think Somerville High's vibrant eportfolios, in comparison to the prior paper folders or a test score alone); ’Rapid’ information on youths’ personal development and well-being (central 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 way 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:

Structural cracks.

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 now 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).

More free tools; more student, family, and teacher participation in testing them.

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 seeding successful communications way more likely!

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. I'm currently agnostic on whether it's better to create tools from scratch. While the free, open source hotline was made quickly by an experienced technologist, the slow development on the dashboard project gives me pause - we gave a young local technologist more to do than a young person on a fixed budget should probably do. Our most successful projects have been testing existing free tools: 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! We've also been making the case for better and more available hardware and internet access in public schools too.

I only started thinking about tech’s role in school communications in 2009. It's clear to me now that,

a) commonplace tech 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.

b) Tech also 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.

c) And tech also makes collaboration -- the holy grail of improving schools! -- more possible. As Clay Shirky puts it of social media generally, "here comes everybody" – but in schools, only if you translate information, show people how to use technology, and invite/encourage everyone’s participation.

d) Tech + people power = communication: tech can't stand alone. 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. Eportfolio teachers had to sit with students and encourage them to share their talents online before students were actually ready to share it.

I've been calling all this work "improving the communication infrastructure of public education." That's because we're seeing that if you give free/low cost communication tools and strategies to people working to support 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.

Our Main ¡Ahas! So Far (in progress)

Notes by Mica Pollock

You’ll see ¡Aha! written in red throughout this website. That means a moment when we figured out something of use about improving communications in education.

Across the OneVille Project, we've become pretty convinced by the following ideas:

¡Aha! Face to face, on paper, or electronically, people communicating with the goal of enabling young people’s full talent development will support children most effectively.

With that in mind:

¡Aha! To support young people, schools can focus on improving information-sharing between the supporters in young people’s lives. At any moment, each supporter in a young person's life (and particularly, the student, parent, and teacher) knows something that the others need to know in order to promote student success. Can they share it? If not, what needs to happen?

¡Aha! To build the motivation, trust, and ability to communicate, schools can focus on strengthening relationships between the people in young people’s lives. A Parent Connector put a repeated ¡Aha! this way: “My main conclusion is that relationships matter and they are what makes everything work.”

¡Aha! Sometimes, people need relationships in order to communicate. Sometimes, they need to share information in order to build a relationship.

¡Aha! Basic, free, low-cost tech can help people in schools build relationships (a text makes you smile) and share information (a text tells you about a resource).

¡Aha! Making new communication tools available in schools (e.g., allowing texting) can help spark communications that spark relationships that buoy the motivation to communicate further.

¡Aha! But only IF people communicate in the spirit of supporting young people's success together. Not all communication is good!

Consider a parent listserv. Without the listserv, people can't so quickly share resources with all. Sharing a resource can lead a next parent to share a resource. But consider a listserv where parents just sling accusations at other parents.

¡Aha! Tech doesn't inherently improve communication: the people using the tech do. That means that human beings need to shape tech use in schools.

Students and teachers set ground rules for texting to clarify to each other how they wanted to use the channel. No inappropriate texts were sent.

Eportfolio teachers sat down with young people and encouraged them to share their skills on the online tool. Students started to share.

Even if you get student data rapidly off a dashboard, you have to then use the data to support a young person more effectively.

¡Aha! Tech's design can add new topics and partners to a conversation.

Think a comment box on a dashboard that encourages a parent to reply: that invites a new partner into the conversation.

Think an eportfolio rubric that asks young people to post evidence of their "creativity" rather than just their "math assignments." That invites a new topic into the conversation.

¡Aha! Throughout, we've seen core issues that need to be addressed proactively if “adding tech” to school life is to increase inclusion in public education rather than exacerbate inequality.

These include money; time; privacy and trust; information access; translation; participation inequality; and the quality and accuracy of the information people share. More on these throughout this website!

¡Aha! We've also seen that tech is more inclusive when it is low cost and simple, when access to technology is made more possible by use of common-denominator tools like cell phones and computers put in public places, and when tech’s use is explained and invited.

¡Aha! We've also been seeing that innovating communication solutions together in a community itself helps unite people, because people start to treat each other as necessary partners in young people’s success. People start to ask: what are the barriers to working and talking together, and how can those be overcome?

¡Aha! Those of us who do research for a living have also been learning that improving communications in a community involves community organizing as much as it involves basic research. No strategy gets seeded, and no tool gets used, unless people are inspired to communicate.

¡Aha! Major innovation energy exists in every school community.