In a few recent talks (for example, TASLA and ALA), I’ve been floating the idea of digital badges as indicators of learning. There has been a lot of talk in higher education about this, but less in K-12. In many ways, the digital badging movement builds on scouts’ historic use of badges. The badge represents that a scout has achieved an articulated set of skills.

At its best, badges are a digital spin on Wiggins and McTighe’s backwards design as discussed in Understanding by Design. A badge maker asks three questions:

1. What do I want the badge-earner to know or be able to do? (Objective)
2. How will I know that the badge-earner knows it or can do it? (Evidence)
3. What kinds of learning activities (face-to-face, virtual, formal, informal, self-paced, teacher-paced, etc.) does the badge-earner need in order to achieve the knowledge or skill? (Learning activities)

In some ways, badging is a brother to the standards-based grading system that is gaining a toehold. In standards-based grading, the focus is on noting when students have mastered certain standards or skills, not on how they perform on individual tasks on a teacher-driven timeline. What complicates the badging discussion is how to keep badging intrinsically motivating or appealing rather than extrinsically driven or a top-down renaming for existing assessment practices.

Today, Education Week is making one of its articles available without subscription, and it gives the finest overview of the badging movement and its pros and cons I’ve seen. I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting some of the opening texts to whet your appetite:

[E]lectronic images could be earned for a wide variety of reasons in multiple learning spaces, including after-school programs, summer workshops, K-12 classrooms, and universities. And once earned, the badges could follow students throughout their lifetimes, being displayed on websites or blogs and included in college applications and résumés …

Advocates of this vision for K-12 contend that such badges could help bridge educational experiences that happen in and out of school, as well as provide a way to recognize “soft skills” such as leadership and collaboration. Badges could paint a more granular and meaningful picture of what a student actually knows than a standardized-test score or a letter grade, they say.

But not all educators are convinced of the merits of the idea. Because badges are still being developed and have not yet been introduced into classrooms, how they would fit into the structure of K-12 education and whether they could actually fulfill the goals that proponents have described are still up for debate.

Other skeptics argue that introducing digital badges into informal education settings—where most agree they would have the greatest impact initially—could bring too much structure and hierarchy to the very places students go to seek refuge from formal achievement tracking. And many point to research that suggests rewarding students, with a badge for instance, for activities they would have otherwise completed out of personal interest or intellectual curiosity actually decreases their motivation to do those tasks …

Among the strongest proponents of [badges] is the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has spearheaded the digital-badges movement for lifelong learning by launching a competition for badge proposals in partnership with Mozilla, a nonprofit Web organization best known for its open-source browser Firefox, and HASTAC, or Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a network of individuals promoting new technologies for learning.

“Kids are learning in their peer group. They’re learning online. They’re learning in interest groups and after-school programs,” says Constance M. Yowell, the director of education for U.S. programs at the MacArthur Foundation. “One of the things that is abundantly clear to us is that learning is incredibly fragmented, and there’s nobody that’s helping the learning that’s happening across those connections.”

Helping to string together learning achievements across informal and formal education, as well as at transitional education points, such as from precollegiate to higher education and from formal education into the workplace, is one of the main goals of badge advocates.

For example, K-12 students could earn badges for mastering certain content, such as physics or trigonometry, or for soft skills acquired in afterschool settings, such as leadership or environmental stewardship, that could paint a clearer picture of themselves for college admissions officers.

“How do you make visible what kids are learning, and how do you help them get credit for it?” says Yowell. “How do you build bridges across the multiple places that kids are learning so they can see the connections between what they’re learning inside of school and outside of school?”

All the colors of the rainbow | Flickr – Photo Sharing! via kwout

Every now and again, there is a convergence, a similar theme that runs through the conversations I have with colleagues at work, colleagues in the field, and folks in my personal life.

The issue? The amount of time students spend doing coloring. For example, the child who circled the correct picture on a primary worksheet on beginning sounds instead of coloring it in … and got it marked wrong.

In this case, the student learned an important (albeit goofy!) reading comprehension lesson: even if the teacher said you could circle the answer instead of color so you could save time, circling is so detrimental that it overshadows the fact that you understood the beginning sound. Thank goodness for assessments. The poor kid got a 60% because apparently, the goal of the task wasn’t to identify beginning sounds (he picked the right choice, so he understood the content). The goal was to color something in. He didn’t, and as a result, his grade book entry demonstrates below-average comprehension skills.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that the kid is already reading, thus making a worksheet on beginning sounds a mismatch for the skills he’s ready for …

It brings to mind Mike Schmoker’s 2001 essay for Education Week, “The Crayola Curriculum.” Here are a few snippets of what he says, though you will definitely want to read the whole thing. In over 300 school visits, supposedly when the school was “at its best,” he observed lots of activities during reading block that had nothing to do with, uh, reading. He found …

Students were not reading, they weren’t writing about what they had read, they weren’t learning the alphabet or its corresponding sounds; they weren’t learning words or sentences or how to read short texts.

They were coloring. Coloring on a scale unimaginable to us before these classroom tours. The crayons were ever-present. Sometimes, students were cutting or building things out of paper (which they had colored) or just talking quietly while sitting at “activity centers” that were presumably for the purpose of promoting reading and writing skills. These centers, too, were ubiquitous, and a great source of pride to many teachers and administrators. They were great for classroom management—and patently, tragically counterproductive.

One of the questions I would occasionally ask teachers during these rounds, especially if it was late in the school year, was whether or not students knew the alphabet and its sounds. The teachers would regularly say no, but add that, after all, these were either poor or second-language students. The question in my mind, never uttered, was this: “Why wouldn’t they be learning the alphabet? Why are they coloring instead of being taught to read?”

…In one high-poverty district where I made several visits, the principals were not only ecstatic, but ecstatic at the opportunity these observations created. In two years, their scores on the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition for grades 2-4 went up by 25 percentile points; in math, they went up by 40 points.

That’s just a snippet of Schmoker’s essay, but even a decade later, his words ring true. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve been there. So often, we reach for the craft supplies for a “response activity” in our elementary library classes that’s really a kind of behavior management caulk to fill the space between storytime, checkout, and dismissal. It keeps little exploring hands busy. (They don’t call it busywork for nothing!)

Seriously, I have seen a case where the title page of a book has been copied and the children have been guided to color in the characters.

Coloring is not an art form, right? We don’t have art curriculum objectives that are solved with coloring sheets, so I’m excluding from concern those activities that directly correlate to the learning objective and have explicit art-based instruction around them (e.g., learning to work with pastels to better understand Caldecott art forms).

And I do believe there is some value in sketches and drawings to help young students work through or demonstrate understanding of informational texts. Just like rulers and tape measures to help us convert numbers into concepts.

But just coloring? That’s not what is meant by the NETS*S pillar of “creativity and innovation.” NETS*S mean creative THINKING, not having a tool in one’s hand.

For most of us, Common Core is starting to nip at our heels. If you’re looking for a fast activity, try something with WRITING with your youngest library learners. For example, the word “because” can do a huge amount to help young learners recognize that arguments need to be supported by details. So here are a few potential “because” prompts you could try:

Mudge is a good companion for Henry BECAUSE …
The [animal]would be a terrible pet BECAUSE …
This book does/does not deserve to win a Caldecott BECAUSE…
[Classmate] would enjoy reading [book you've read] BECAUSE …
Anansi is a trickster. We know this BECAUSE …

You know my old saw: that as a single person approaching (gulp) middle age, there’s a high chance that I will have nursing home attendants caring for me in the sunset of my life. And I sure as heck don’t want them coloring instead of articulating what should happen. :)

What non-coloring sponge activities have worked for you and your students’ development?

PS – For the record, I have nothing against Crayola products — I own lots! — or crayons. It’s not the tool, it’s how it’s used.

From Time magazine comes the news that General Electric’s foundation is getting into the educational funding business.

This morning the GE Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the multinational General Electric Company, announced a landmark $18 million investment to support state implementation of the new Common Core standards and train teachers how to use them …

GE is giving $18 million to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit consulting organization launched by David Coleman. Coleman, a Rhodes scholar and classicist who built and sold a successful student assessment company before moving into the nonprofit sector, is one of the architects of the Common Core standards. Student Achievement Partners will use GE’s money to create institutes to train teachers, build an online tool for sharing resources and lessons, and help teachers model best practices with the new standards …

In addition to the size of the donation, GE is running toward controversy rather than away from it. The Common Core is not universally popular, and among many conservative (read: business-friendly) state legislators, the shared standards project is an object of great suspicion, if not outright opposition. And there is a determined group of activists and academics trying to bring it down.

I asked Bob Corcoran, the President of the GE foundation, why they were stepping into the breach when there are so many less controversial ways to be involved in education. He described the development of the standards as an incredibly hard-won achievement, but then pointed out that the coming implementation of these new standards would be the real “test of mettle, a test of commitment.”

Question for you: If you had the funding you needed, what kinds of PD would your staff benefit from if you are in a Common Core state? Now … how could you provide it for no money?

Side note: is it just me, or does it make you just a teensy bit uncomfortable that the guy who wrote the majority of the standards is now getting a huge influx of cash for his organization to help implement them?

Read the entire article here.