Research base

Notes by Mica Pollock

Here are some citations to previous research and some ideas/¡Ahas! I've been chewing on as PI of the OneVille Project, in conversation with literally hundreds of people featured or mentioned on this website.

(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. )

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 -- the people who share individual students, classrooms, schools, and communities. Let’s call the young person in the middle “Jose.”

Research makes clear that supporting regular communication between these people, with the goal of supporting students' full talent development (Dewey 1897), is key to improving today’s schools. As Daly et al (2010) sum up after a host of studies on communications in education, “increased social interaction among all of the school’s stakeholders, is believed to be at the heart of system reform and school improvement” (362).

That's because these people -- including Jose -- each have ideas, information, and resources that the others need to know as they try to support Jose (see, e.g., González, Moll, and Amanti 2005)

Substantial research shows that to partner in any young person’s development, students and their supporters need to communicate regularly about students’ progress, interests, and experiences and about available resources, offering "high help" to students and communicating with "high expectations" for their success (Ferguson 2008).

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 routinely 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 often 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 regularly about what’s available (Mickelson and Cousins 2008). Service providers who share regions are realizing that communicating regularly about common issues is key to partnership (http://www.strivetogether.org/.

In fact, none of our field’s far-reaching reforms can occur without embedding some new communication infrastructure enabling necessary communications. “Data-driven,” multi-sector decision-making (Lin and Zaff 2010) requires schools and districts to create, embed, and train users on database infrastructure for sharing reliable and ready data (Boudett et al 2005). “Authentic assessment” requires schools and districts to embed assessment infrastructure aiding students to communicate a full range of their skills (Darling-Hammond and Pecheone 2010). Efforts to “personalize” student learning (Yonezawa, Jones, and McClure forthcoming) require schools to embed infrastructure enabling routine updates on youths’ development. “Engaging” communities and families requires schools to embed infrastructure enabling school-family communication (Taveras et al 2010, Henderson et al 2007, Mediratta et al 2009). How will all this infrastructure be designed?

Most of the above scholarship, and much of the scholarship calling explicitly for equity in education, has not looked so explicitly at the channels (Hymes 1972) through which people in school communities do or could communicate necessary information or build relationships, nor documented active tests of channels for enabling particular forms of information-sharing and relationship-building. Enter social media research, which cares specifically about the forms of information sharing and relationship that tech channels afford. In education, then, designers need to delve deep into communities’ communication needs and ask pointed questions about communications’ design: do teachers share student progress updates with immigrant parents most effectively via phones, email, or in person? Can mentors empower low income youth with college information most effectively via text message, written documents, or face-to-face? How can eportfolio rubrics be designed to motivate ongoing communication about students’ range of talents, between teachers, young people, and families? What public norms should be set if diverse stakeholders are to communicate successfully using a listserv, texting, or even just email? Which communications prompt (or threaten) the feeling of partnership necessary to keep partnering, particularly across language, race/ethnicity, and class?

So, throughout the OneVille Project, we asked the following design research questions:

-To support young people, who in a diverse community needs to communicate which information to whom?

-What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome?

-Which channels (used how), and which efforts to build relationships, might support particular necessary communications between these people?

-When might specific forms of commonplace technology help increase community cooperation in young people’s success, by supporting diverse students, teachers, parents, administrators, service providers, and other community members to share ideas, resources, and necessary information and to build relationships? What are the limitations to technology use?

I've begun to ask a final question recently:

-How might school communities embed new communication infrastructure when they don’t currently have it?

So, some ¡Ahas!

¡Aha! Communication gaps are structural cracks in the foundation of partnership.

For example: let's say Jose never tells teacher that he likes to learn science.

Let’s say that teacher knows Jose loves science, but never hears from afterschool provider about a free science fair in the community.

Let’s say that the parent doesn't hear from administrator about how to enroll Jose in afterschool care.

Let’s say the tutor doesn't hear from teacher what young Jose needs to work on. Can she tutor him as effectively?

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 (Aarons 2009). 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 (Yonezawa, Jones, and McClure forthcoming). Due to translation barriers (Zehr 2011), 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).

Actually, all of the major things we want to do in education require better communications. Research on data-driven decision-making emphasizes that educators and service providers need to communicate better about student data (Boudett et al 2005; in the OneVille Project, we built data dashboards. Research on authentic assessment clarifies that students need to communicate to teachers what they can actually do (Darling-Hammond and Pecheone 2010; in the OneVille Project, we designed and seeded eportfolios). Research on family and community engagement shows that administrators and teachers need to communicate better with families (Mediratta et al 2009, Oakes and Rogers 2006; Henderson et al 2007; in the OneVille Project, we designed a Parent Connector Network testing a hybrid of phone calls, hotline, and face to face coffee hours.) And most germane for the texting pilot, research on youth engagement and mentoring indicates that students and mentors 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.

¡Aha! Improving public school communications particularly requires increasing the following ‘’’necessary communications,’’’ all of which are called for in educational research:

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).

¡Aha! Teachers, students, and families can add “infrastructure” to make such necessary communications, more possible.

So, here’s what I’ve personally been learning on the OneVille Project: like adding new tunnels or roads connecting people, people in schools can add new communication infrastructure, to enable necessary communications.

By “communication infrastructure,” I mean embedded tools and strategies prompting people to communicate (an eportfolio; approved text messaging), and people’s habits of actually communicating (posting on eportfolios; sending texts).

Like adding new roads and showing people how to drive, new communication infrastructure “formally” embeds opportunities to communicate into the everyday life of schools, shaping the ongoing “informal” communications that then occur (building on Coburn, Choi, and Mata, in Daly et al 2010).

Communication infrastructure can steer people to communicate face-to-face (a regularly scheduled parent-teacher meeting), on paper (a bulletin board), and using some technology (a tool allowing parents and students to check grades online). Without such infrastructure, necessary communications are less possible or less likely.

In The OneVille Project, we've embedded communication infrastructure in Somerville schools. For example, through their pilot work, Somerville High School teachers and students seeded eportfolios across their school. So, students and teachers are now communicating far more examples of their skills, interests, and talents online. With the old infrastructure – paper folders of five paragraph essays kept in a locked cabinet -- SHS students could communicate far less about who they were and what they could do. New eportfolios also add new information to the conversation because they ask students to share skills in “negotiation” and “creativity” as well as in “English” and “math.”

Another example of embedding communication infrastructure: through their pilot work, teachers and students at Full Circle/Next Wave have been normalizing use of a channel that is often banned from schools – texting. By allowing and using text messaging to talk about school and life, teachers and students have created new infrastructure for student-teacher relationship-building and information-sharing.

But:

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

"More" communication over communication infrastructure isn't inherently good: people can share hearsay or insults more quickly on new listservs, or post half-hearted work on new eportfolios, or ridicule each other via texts.

That is, people have to communicate with student success in mind. An eportfolio is just a blank page, after all; students and teachers could send anything over text message. We saw that eportfolio teachers had to talk to young people face to face, encourage them to present "their best" to a caring audience, and support some students to learn how to make eportfolio entries. Students themselves had to then create and post entries on their eportfolios. After teachers saw one student's poem and another student's drawings on eportfolios, they began to praise students for those skills. Then, students shared more -- and both kept communicating about jobs, internships, and more. If the "infrastructure" of eportfolios didn't exist, none of this would have happened, but the basic tool of an eportfolio template does not a great eportfolio make.

Another example: allowing texting at Full Circle/Next Wave made texting possible. But teachers had to send small, caring text messages to young people encouraging them to talk whenever needed; then students began to respond via text. They began then to use texting to discuss a range of student support issues and in the process, solidified their relationships to teachers and school.

¡Aha! Information-sharing and relationship-building are two key processes of youth support that can be made easier with technology.

I've been seeing that communicating about student success can lead TO relationships (a caring text makes you text back) and good relationships lead to communicating more about student success (Connectors calling homes). 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.

Other ¡Ahas!

¡Aha! Various “teams” of people need to communicate if they are 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?).

¡Aha! A key challenge in public education today is figuring out what "blend" of face to face communication, technology, and paper enables the most effective youth support.

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).

Tech supplements, not supplants, face-to-face helping (Turkle xx). Tech tools at their best amplify human helpfulness: 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.

¡Aha! 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.

¡Aha! Students, educators, and families can innovate important uses of technologies in education -- themselves.

Too often, tech tools rain down on teachers, youth and families told to use them. (I've heard stories of teachers just walking in to their classrooms to find chalkboards replaced by smartboards, without training). We've wanted to test technologies in collaboration with diverse educators, youth, families, and local technologists. I’m now convinced that this is the only way to proceed - not only because these are the people who know which communications are necessary for youth support, but also because involving “end users” in the design makes seeding successful communications far more likely.

¡Aha! If we’re going to use tech in education, let’s use inexpensive technology so everyone can use whatever works.

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. So, we’ve been working to test -- and then, only when necessary, 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, because "free" tools require very responsible and skilled developers (who have to be paid by somebody) and, even "free" tools require reliable tech support that you also typically have to pay for. Is it better to buy expensive tools off the shelf that come with tech support built in, or to make your own "free" tools? I'm not sure, but in an era when you can Google any product you want to buy for free, there really isn't any reason that districts and schools should be paying huge fees just to see basic data.

Our most successful projects have tested existing free tools or, worked with very experienced open source developers: 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. In the eportfolio project, it became clear that software blocking, and old hardware, literally mean that students and teachers can't communicate what they want to say.

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

¡Aha! 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.

¡Aha! This means that tech also can make collaboration -- the holy grail of improving schools -- more possible -- if you actively remedy barriers to access.

In schools, you encourage “everybody’s” participation on technology only if you translate information, show people how to use technology, and invite/encourage everyone’s participation.

¡Aha! 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. Instead of a handout in a backpack, knowledge of a science fair can be shared community-wide across hundreds of diverse readers on a well-accessed listserv – if someone cares enough about other parents to post it and translate it.

¡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 totally new information about students' skills, into the conversation.

¡Aha! But schools need to deal with the details of access barriers if they are truly to close structural cracks rather than widen them.

Parents who already email their superintendent and teachers regularly will benefit more from a listserv than parents who do not know how to read English or use a mouse. Enabling partnership means dealing directly with the details of access barriers.

More examples: all students who wanted to text had phones, but some lost them and couldn’t afford to replace them; those with less expensive plans ran out of minutes and literally could no longer respond via text like their peers could. Money affects the data plan you can pay for (and so, what you can say and see), and the speed of a broadband connection (faster costs more); cheap plans enabling broadband access “for all” at times often enable slower communications for some. The Healey School began actively pursuing a schoolwide listserv to replace a program-specific listserv, but less tech-savvy parents needed email accounts, accessible computers, and lessons to join the listserv or use translation software, as well as encouragement to actually speak up on the listserv. So, enabling communications at this level of detail is crucial to jumpstarting partnership.

CONSIDER DELETING FROM HERE DOWN.

Some final overall ¡Aha!s :

¡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 (you won't send a text until you know someone). Sometimes, they need to share information in order to build a relationship (an early text about the start time for class can lead to banter, jokes, and then, more texts).

¡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. A text makes you smile and tells you about a resource; either makes you want to text back.

¡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. Honing norms for using tech is as important as adding tech.

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! The same issues that undermine partnership in schools, period, undermine partnership when you “add tech.” Barriers of money, information access, translation, and participation inequality need to be addressed proactively if “adding tech” to school life is to increase inclusion in public education rather than exacerbate inequality.

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

¡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 -- me! -- 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. Unleash it!

¡Aha! 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.

[edit] ¡Aha! Here’s a logic we all share: It takes a network to raise a child!

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