Comparing Open Source Software Development with Teacher Development Possibilities
I recently spent a week in Washington, D.C. as part of a Federal Policy Institute, sponsored by Teachers College, Columbia University. As a student in the Politics and Education program, I have been wrestling with the policy implications of the open education content movement. While most great ideas start at the grass roots level, eventually policy makers feel compelled to get involved to regulate the environment, or to enhance the ability for the movement to grow. One of my goals as a co-founder of Open Planner is to support policies that do the latter.
As something of a policy entrepreneur, I am constantly sifting through policy problems, trying to match Open Planner and organizations like ours with the right "problem" as the appropriate "solution". In the current climate of NCLB, "Highly Qualified Teachers", or the lack thereof, are a topic of much debate. Whether the conversation during NCLB's reauthorization leads to a new goal: highly effective teachers, or to the term "highly accomplished teacher," as the NEA advocates, the problem remains the same: there is inconsistent teacher quality in this country, and this problem is exacerbated by the closed systems in which teachers usually operate.
While I am still developing my specific policy recommendations, I have attempted to compare teacher development possibilities with the open source software development community, as a first step in understanding a possible beginning of a solution. My thoughts are outlined below:
Lessons from the Open Source Software Development Community: A Possible New Direction in Teacher Development: New technology that makes the communication and collaboration amongst professionals much easier has the potential to change the way professional development is “delivered†to teachers. Web 2.0 tools, which enable people with no computer programming skills to author and alter documents on the Interet, can also enable teachers to “deliver†their own professional development as they engage with one another, using their collective intelligence to figure out how to improve curriculum and instruction. A grassroots movement of committed educators working collaboratively on curriculum development, modeled after successful open source software development teams like The Apache Foundation and Linux, could revolutionize teacher development in a manner appropriate with the skills needed for the 21st century.
A Brief Overview of the Open Source Software Development Model
- Open source refers to a software licensing and development practice by which source code, typically in the form of instructions written in a computer language, is made available for free use and modification by others, provided the same general public licensing and attribution practices are followed by others.
- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which is the world’s most popular web server software, is an example of a group that has quite effectively implemented the open source software development model. Apache’s software is free, and their production model relies on different levels of contributors donating their time for free to improving the source code. Exemplary contributors get nominated to go to the next level, where they are given the authority to alter the code.
- Research indicates that people give their time and intellectual resources for free, simply because they take pleasure in the work. It is creative, enjoyable work, and individuals can donate exactly as much time as they wish, working on the area of code most interesting to them.
- Self-selection of tasks for figuring out how to improve the software is a common reason cited for the high quality of software produced by open source development communities.
- A symbiotic ecology has developed between free software and for-profit enterprises such as IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and others, as they are using and selling support services to businesses who prefer the sophistication and low cost of open source products. These open source business models add value by providing service and tertiary applications to the free, open source base-product, and these paid engineers and developers are typically hired from within the open source community.
Applying the Open Source Model to Create Highly Qualified Teachers
- On a daily basis, a teacher typically works on many projects, such as authoring and execution of a lesson plan (or 2 or 3 or 4 depending on the number of different courses/grade level she is teaching), creating assessments for student work and evaluating those assessments, and attempting to synthesize all lessons and assessments within the larger context of state standards and curriculum goals. The success of these projects are bounded by the restraints all traditional projects face: the results (the lesson plans, the papers graded) expected within a certain amount of time (the bell is about to ring! The marking period is about to end!) using a limited amount of resources,(whatever knowledge the teacher possesses about effective instruction, which is likely very little at the beginning of a career) There will inevitably be a trade-off amongst these three parameters, and quality of instruction will suffer.
- If teachers entered into an “open source†or “commons based peer production†model of project development with colleagues in their school, their school district, their state, their country, or the world, they could erase some of the traditional tension between results, time, and resources. With a large number of educators working together to not only create instructional resources, but also to discuss how to effectively implement these instructional resources (a method research shows is one of the best form of professional development for improving teacher quality), all participating teachers in each curriculum production community would benefit from the collective intelligence of his or her peers.
- Curriculum teams could be modeled after the Apache Foundation’s hierarchical system, with experienced or exceptional teachers nominated by peers to be given more control over the team’s curriculum development process, and new teachers given only the ability to view documents, ask questions, and participate in discussions about delivery of instruction.
- Curriculum resources developed would be made free for use by anyone, under a Creative Commons share-alike license.
- Quality of instruction would improve for the same reason that high quality emerges from open source software development projects: teachers will work on those aspects of curriculum development that they are good at, and that they most enjoy, and then share this high quality—both by giving the content and through a discussion about pedagogy---with colleagues teaching the same course.
- Teachers are content experts in different sub-areas of their teaching field. For example, one government teacher might have a passion for the Presidency, while another knows campaigns inside and out due to personal experience working for a U.S. Senator. Additionally, some teachers are better at creating assessments, while other excel at crafting unique lesson plans and activities. If teachers self-select what they want to contribute to their curriculum teams, and enough people participate in these projects, the quality that emerges will easily surpass that of an individual working alone.
- Open curriculum teams conducting “action research†on their pedagogy will contribute to a national repository of “what worksâ€. An “open source†model of curriculum development opens up classrooms that have heretofore been closed, allowing teachers across the world to effectively communicate about best practices within their discipline.
- Succinctly, as Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux computer operating system surmised: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Given a larger and more diverse group of contributors, defects are more easily fixed, thus improving the overall quality of the product.†While the creation of curriculum and instruction products is clearly not identical to the creation of software products, the open source software development community’s success models a new direction for the teaching profession, one it should attempt to adapt and emulate, from the bottom up.
- Jennifer Stillman's blog
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Kudos and further thoughts to start discusion
Jennifer, what a great summary of the potential impact that this movement might have on all our lives. You have captured so much of what might be realized if we can just figure out how to collectively harness all our energies, enthusiasms, expertise and skills to really collaborate.Â
You have raised the open source software development movement as a model that we can emulate and whose economies might also apply to us, but it seems to me that there is something really challenging about teaching. It seems to me and that there is something about our goal that is more multi-dimensional and harder to capture than whatever it is that it takes to develop good code.
Perhaps, I am wrong, but I would like to push the analogy further, because maybe in the process of determining how good curricular and teacher materials are or are not like good code we can figure out some guidelines from the coding community that are very applicable or some processes and requirements that we might expect to be very different.
I have no answers but would like to start the discussion by observing that good code is transparent to the user and almost user proof, but some of the best curricula like ASU's Modeling Instruction require paradigm shifts on the part of the instructor as much if not more than on the part of the students. An online collaborative community of teachers who get in on the ground floor of a curriculum development project may successfully work through their transformation together, as they internalize through dialogue and shared experience the design criteria and critical aspects of the pedagogy that make the implementation successful, but what is required to scaffold the experience of the instructor who joins the community years later. There are many exemplary curricular and pedogogical approaches that have been developed but failed in the implementation stage or gradually died away, because whatever "hidden variables" that it took to implement the program successfully did not transfer with the curriculum or over time.
As teachers we are very aware of the challenges of "transfer." with our students. We have internalize that we cannot expect what is in our head to "transfer" directly to our students heads and that our students need to be actively engaged in some process that leads them to their own understanding and then cross-check that understanding and refine it.
Teachers need to do the same thing pedagogically, our goal is not to create curricula that are "teacher proof" like good code, but perhaps quite the opposite. So in designing curricula and collaborative processes, we need to think about scaffolding and structuring the active-engagement of future teachers as well as ourselves. That is a tall order, but again holding the ASU Modeling Instruction Program up as a model as a successful example of teacher collaboration, the on-going teacher workshops are as much an active part of sustaining that program as the curriculum is. Is it possible in an on-line forum to recreate and prepetuate or perhaps advance that professonal development experience, or are there forms of "active-engagement" such as playing student and playing teacher for your peers and getting their feedback that are just required to make the transformation to superb teaching and an online collaborative forum could never replace that step our collective road to expertise.
Will it work? That is, indeed, the question
Thanks for your feedback, Janet. The questions you ask are ones that repeatedly surface at the dinner table. Is the open source model transferable? Is the art of teaching too different from the skill of coding? Or is teaching more of a skill that is learnable than we have been willing to acknowledge as a profession? Or is coding more of a creative art form than a cold science, and thus a workable analogy?
Personally, I have always been a teacher who just wants to do her own thing, just wants to experiment with creative ideas in the classroom and design elaborate lesson plans. Since I have gotten involved with Open Planner and have started thinking more deeply about the importance of sharing and internalizing best practices, I question whether or not my experimentation was in the best interest of my students. Would I have better served them if I had done more research on what works, and discussed my ideas with other teachers before proceeding unabashedly? Perhaps. But it didn't even really occur to me. I have mostly taught in schools where I can't find like minded pedagogues, and thus I'd rather not even engage in the discussion, because we aren't even starting at the same place. Open Planner might at least bring people together who are starting at the same place philosophically, and then these birds of a feather can push each other while supporting each other. I want to be a better teacher. This is clearer to me 6 years in than it was at the beginning of my career. Maybe this tool will help me get there.
I highlight the word "internalizing" in the previous paragraph because I think this gets a bit at what you're exploring. How do ideas get transferred to teachers in a way that transforms their pedagogy? Can it happen on-line? Can in happen through a written reflection that doesn't involve direct human interaction?
I think on-going dialogue about pedagogy and open reflection in a virtual forum is better than nothing, but not as good as the type of active engagement you describe. I think in person interactions that are sustained through an Open Planning dialogue would yield the best results, which is why we're playing around with running EdCamps as a way to inject the flesh into the mix. Curriculum team members might also invite one another to visit their classrooms if an in-person demonstration is needed to push the team's thinking forward.
I think a well-designed initiation process of new people to a team will be vital to that new teacher's ability to internalize a new way of teaching. New teacher's questions will also be vital to the health of teams, as they are forced to clarify their way of doing things, and perhaps rethink their pedagogical choices. We at Open Planner need to think about the development of suggested protocols that might push teams in the right direction.
I don't yet know what a good curriculum team's conversations and resources will look like on-line. But I'd like to think I'll know it when I see it, and others will too as they are shopping around the Internet for their own professional development opportunities. We just have to keep working to figure out how to facilitate the creation of the curriculum teams we think are possible. These conversations are part of that work, so thanks again.