And so I started calling the schools in this area, and lo and behold -- I'd hate to say how long ago that was, but I ran into a school counselor who

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1 HOW IS CONTEXTUAL TEACHING AND LEARNING BEING APPLIED IN CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION? OCTOBER 30, 2001 (WEBCAST TRANSCRIPTION BY PROFESSIONAL REPORTERS, INC ) >> ALTSCHULD: Hi, everybody. You're supposed to say hi. I'm Jim Altschuld, and I'm the evaluation coordinator for the National Centers for Career and Technical Education. I'm delighted today to be introducing Dr. Susan Sears. Sue and I have known each other for -- let's just say it's gone back a few years, you know, just a few years. Sue has been a faculty member in the College of Education, she currently is a faculty member, and she's been on the faculty for approximately 23 years. And I know that exactly because we started together. So I have to -- I have to bring that up. Prior to -- she has also served in the College of Education as an associate dean. And prior to that, she worked in the schools as a teacher and a counselor. So we have a person who has a lot of experience across a lot of different educational settings, venues, and types of different working situations, I think K through 12. Is that correct? K through 12. Okay. Sue specializes in counselor education, and she utilizes contextual teaching and learning, the strategies of that, in teaching counselors for mental health and educational situations. She has studied best practices in contextual teaching and learning. And she from that -- from that study has created a series of case studies that are on a Web site. So I thought I'd make sure you know the Web site. And it's So if you want to see the case studies, certainly you can go there. Now I get -- I get some royalty from that? I get a little trade-off, sure. Currently, she is writing a book on contextual teaching and learning in teacher education and directing a project on transforming the role of school counselors in today's schools. Now, that's sort of a formal introduction, but I would be remiss if I didn't go a little different direction. A long time ago, long before there was a National Center for Research in Vocational Ed, the first National Center, there was something called the Center for Research in Vocational Ed. And I was an evaluator in that center, testing occupational exploration modules. Sandy remembers those, absolutely.

2 And so I started calling the schools in this area, and lo and behold -- I'd hate to say how long ago that was, but I ran into a school counselor who greatly aided us in getting sites to test out the materials. It was appreciated then; it is still appreciated today. And so it's really a delight for me to introduce a close colleague, a dear friend, a longtime colleague -- we won't say how many years. We won't say how many years. And Sue's topic is how is contextual teaching and learning being applied in career and technical education? So let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Susan Jones Sears. (Applause) >> SEARS: Thank you. I appreciate the welcome by Jim. And it has been a long time, but you're looking good, so I guess that's what counts. This evening what I'm -- or this afternoon what I'm going to do is talk a little bit about contextual teaching and learning, obviously. And as Jim told you, my background in contextual teaching and learning really is related more to teacher ed. And so we have had -- Sandy Pritz was a part of it, if she's in the audience here. We have had a very significant, I think, contextual teaching and learning project in teacher education, but today we're going to be focusing more on career and technical education. So I want to discuss what contextual teaching and learning is and what it is not because I think it's important to get a sense of what it is not. I want to give some examples of context teaching and learning and also talk about some support for contextual teaching and learning. I would say to the group that is here, I hope that you will feel comfortable raising questions as we go through this discussion. This is not set to be just a one-way conversation for the next 45 minutes, so please don't hesitate to bring up points or ask questions. I want to start with a definition of contextual teaching and learning. You'll just notice that this is really a rather simple, straightforward definition. We're talking about a conception of teaching and learning that helps teachers relate subject matter content to the real world and helps kids make the connection, to motivate them to make the connection between knowledge and their lives as citizens, as family members, as workers. And that is a, what I would say, very straightforward and simple explanation of what contextual teaching and learning is. Now, obviously, there's nothing that simple. And so there's some additional characteristics or factors that I want to discuss related to contextual teaching and learning. And most of the time from now on I'm just going to call contextual

3 teaching and learning CTL for short. So, first, CTL is supportive of rigorous content. It's clear in today's world that students need the equivalent of a college prep background as well as a career major. The jobs that are available in the next decade or beyond are ones that are going to require high-performing workers. And so we need to be developing high-performing students. And I think in some instances that's not all we can say, and so hopefully CTL would guide us and lead us in that direction. CTL engages students in defining and researching problems. They experience -- when they're doing this, when they're doing this definition and researching of problems, they experience the messiness of ill-structured situations that -- that really are characteristic of the real world. Problems that we sometimes find in textbooks aren't neatly laid out. It's not the kind of problem that we would like to see students reckoning with as they're defining and researching in CT & L. The students assume the role of stakeholders who have some reason to be concerned about the resolution and solution of the problem. They're going to be affected by the outcome of the problem. And so that helps motivate them and get them involved. They engage -- as they define and research the problem they engage in higher order thinking. They get into a deeper discussion of whatever topic it is or whatever problem it is that they're researching. And this depth of knowledge is important, as you know. The disciplined inquiry that they engage in is very important, and it teaches them the kind of skills that they need to really survive in a culture anymore that has more than its share -- or a society that has more than its share of problems. CTL also provides opportunities for students to learn knowledge and skills in a meaningful context, such as the home, the community, and the workplace. The theories of situated cognition point out that knowledge is inseparable from the situation in which it is developing. And so -- and it's also inseparable from the activities in that situation. So we need to have rich and meaningful environments in which students can learn. When you think about the community, the community is such a rich arena of resources. And sometimes we just think we don't access those the way we should. But someone that believes in contextual teaching and learning or practices contextual teaching and learning would definitely be someone that would use the community and the workplace as -- as a context for learning. CTL also builds on the knowledge that learning suggests. It uses their life experiences.

4 It builds on what they know. We all feel more comfortable and familiar with what we know, and we attend to information that's coming in that's related to information that we already possess. So we use these experiences and the context that they're familiar with as kind of instructional platforms to help them move from what they know to what they do not know. Contextual teaching and learning encourages students to direct their own learning and monitor their own progress. There's a great deal of interest on the part of most educators in how to help students to become lifelong learners. If we're going to do that, certainly if we're going to help them achieve that, we're certainly going to have to help them begin that process while they're students in school. So we can teach them how to learn and how to apply learning strategies to what they're -- to the content they're trying to master. We can teach them to monitor how well they are learning, to adapt or change strategies when necessary so that they can increase their learning. This -- the whole area of -- this whole area of trying to get them to accept responsibility for their own learning is very important if they are going to be the kind of workers in the future that in fact will be able to learn on their own. I was reading a book by Meister not long ago, who talks about the skills that workers will need in the future. And one of the things he -- one of the skills that he was addressing was how important it would be for people to -- for the workers to learn how to manage their own careers. And I think many of us are used to thinking that the company will kind of assist us in planning our future. But, in fact, what's going to be happening in the future is that a worker is going to have to take charge of his or her -- of his or her own career. And certainly if they begin to take charge of their own learning when they're in school, there is certainly a great -- or there is a greater chance they will be able to take care -- or take responsibility for their own learning as an adult. Contextual teaching and learning, or CTL, supports instruction that helps students learn together and from each other. The focus cognition theorists address the importance of conversation and interaction in learning. Learning is a social process. And because of that, we -- if you're a CT & L advocate, then you're more than likely to have students working perhaps in cooperative learning situations, but certainly independently, trying to solve a problem. One of the nice ways that defining and researching problems dovetails with this is that when students are defining and researching problems,

5 they are also working together and coming up with explanations for events that they then share with each other. And so many of these characteristics that I'm talking about here interact, and there -- there isn't -- even though the definition that I shared earlier was a fairly simple definition, when you really begin to talk about what that means, helping teachers relate subject matter to the real world and motivating students to make connections, you're talking about a fairly sophisticated or a very sophisticated process. And so defining and researching problems, getting students to work together, and to learn from each other are just parts of that whole picture. Finally, contextual teaching and learning is very interested in authentic assessment, in promoting authentic assessment. CTL believes that the way you really assess the -- what a person has accomplished is through performance or a demonstration, a product, something that you can see, something that really lets you know whether that student did or did not learn the information that you were hoping that they would learn. So, again, if I were -- or as I am trying to engage in contextual teaching and learning myself, in my own classes, what I'm doing is having students either demonstrate or they're producing a product, there's a performance of some kind. In my field in counselor education, for example, students bring in tapes that I listen to and critique and that we listen to together, and they -- they tell me where they could improve, and I tell them where I think they could improve. But there's a product that we're working with, there's feedback being given, and then they're out again, doing another tape, bringing it in, and I'm engaged in an ongoing feedback as the year progresses, so that, in fact, they are gaining skills as -- as the year goes on. So that's one way, for example, that one can use authentic assessment. Another thing that I found very helpful is I ask my students to develop a school counseling program. And so they're given a fictitious urban area that resembles one very close to here, and they then develop a full-blown school counseling program working in teams. And they go into the schools, gather information, use that data to develop their program. And at the end of the experience, which is really about a two-quarter-long experience, they have a product that they can assess and that I can assess, and we have a group of teachers and counselors in that system that critiques the product, also. So an example of authentic assessment. Now, sometimes it's important to recognize what something isn't as well as what something is, and I want to spend just a minute talking about that. Contextual teaching and learning is not lecture -- a lecture-only method of teaching, and that's really what I'm doing right now.

6 I was thinking, as I was getting this ready, that the negative thing about this kind of an interaction is that you're doing what you're telling people that they shouldn't do, and so I'm certainly not modeling a contextual lesson. And I thought for quite a while, to be honest -- I tried to think of something that I might do that I could involve an audience in that would be a demonstration of contextual teaching and learning, and I didn't come up with anything, because I really didn't know who would be here and how I could involve the audience. But, again, it's not the lecture-only method that I happen to be doing right now. It's not busy work or activity for activity's sake. I think that that's one of the problems that we sometimes get into or one of the images we have when we do learning that in many ways is application. We get accused of being involved in busy activity rather than really learning the stuff that you have to learn to pass or to get a good score on the ACT or the SAT, and that's not what this is about. The kinds of activities that you're engaged in when you're doing contextual teaching or the kinds of activities you have students engaged in when they're doing contextual learning are very seriously thought through, well-planned-out activities. And we'll talk a little bit more later about the need to give teachers the time to develop these activities that they need to have because they're certainly a very important part of what we try to do in CTL. CTL isn't doing questions at the end of the chapter. Now, that doesn't mean there might not be a reason for students to glance at the questions at the end of the chapter, if they're trying to become more responsible as a learner, but certainly it's not doing questions at the end of the chapter. It's not rote memorization. It's not trying to remember every fact that you have to remember to do well on a test. And it's not teacher-dominated goal-setting. When you're working in a learning environment that would be described as a CTL learning environment or a CTL environment, it would be one that the student would have input into some of the activities, too. One of the things that I certainly learned as an instructor myself is as I have tried to use more of contextual teaching and learning strategies, I found that my students are smarter. They're smarter than I thought they were. And, obviously, they aren't -- they aren't smarter than I thought they were; I'm giving them a chance to be smarter than I was giving them before because I was kind of dominating the situation and making decisions about what we were going to do. As I am more and more involved in the planning and the goal-setting, what I found is some of them had wonderfully creative ideas. And that, I think, is true of students, whether they're younger

7 students in elementary -- upper elementary, middle, high school, or college-age students. They can be very, very creative when it comes to planning. CTL is not paper-and-pencil tests. That's not the way that you would be trying to assess how someone has done. You wouldn't be giving a paper-and-pencil test only. Now, I want to -- I want to talk -- well, let me stop a minute before I do that and say are there any comments or questions from anybody that's in the group? Yes? >> (Inaudible) teaching and learning with groups of teachers or administrators is the idea that there's no proof, quote/unquote, that this makes any difference in student achievement or that it's worth the time and effort. Can you address the research that exists out there that shows that this does make a difference in student achievement? >> SEARS: Let me respond this way. I think that there is some truth in that. I think that we have not done a good job, generally, in providing evidence that contextual teaching and learning works. Contextual teaching and learning is very similar to authentic teaching and learning, very similar to constructivism. And there's not any body of research that really has addressed whether or not CTL provides the kind of learning that we believe it does. And there are some projects right now across the country that are attempting to measure that. And -- and I'll be mentioning a little bit later what -- there's some work going on at Bowling Green, there's some work going on at the University of Wisconsin, and they are looking at gains in achievement based on the teachers who have been trained -- not teachers who have been trained -- not (inaudible) teachers but practicum teachers who have engaged in professional development and then have gone out and attempted to change the way they teach and then measure student gain. So I -- we will have some of that research, but it's not out there right now. It's more the discrete part of the -- for example, in the situated cognition and areas like that, that we can point to research, that it is important and does work. >> One of the things that I (Inaudible) -- >> SEARS: Yes. (inaudible) (inaudible). >> -- which is very, very similar to contextual teaching and learning, and you can take that rubric that they've developed and pull contextual teaching and learning and then tie it to the longitudinal student achievement across demographic groups as you (inaudible) clear difference. >> SEARS: That's a very good point, and (inaudible) there's no

8 doubt. And they do -- what they call authentic activity are really very much what we would think of as contextual teaching and learning. But contextual teaching and learning, the name, kind of has come within the last five, six, seven years, and as a concept itself, there just isn't that much research on it. But there certainly is other research that's related. Very good point. Any other comments? Yes. >> You had mentioned the idea of knowledge being constructed and socially constructed as students learn from each other, and it reminded me of something I heard on OSU radio Sunday that was a statement by a psychologist, and I got in on the radio late enough that I'm not sure who the person was, but the statement was, reality is socially constructed. And I thought to myself, well, you know, it's interesting, if you think of a contextual teaching and learning setting and the different student perceptions of reality that addressed in a small group might very well lead to important lessons about diversity and respect for other's opinions, you know, the idea that reality itself is socially constructed looked interesting. >> SEARS: That's interesting. That is an interesting comment. In addition to that, your comment made me think about the events of September 11th, and, you know, that reality might be socially constructed at least a little bit differently by some in different parts of the country. For example, the New York reality -- the perception and the reality in New York might be a little different than the perception and reality in Columbus, Ohio. But, still, I think that's a very interesting point, certainly something to think about. Do you have a comment, sir? >> (Inaudible) (inaudible) (inaudible) for teaching and learning at the current school setting. How can you tell the nature of contextual teaching and learning and focus on that? >> SEARS: There are no studies that I can point to that have -- you know, in which contextual teaching and learning was implemented and then we looked at proficiency test scores. But I think that what you often find are students that are having difficulty in achieving enough to do well on the proficiency test. When you give them an opportunity to be involved in their learning, applying some of the concepts that they're learning, having an opportunity to work in groups, you do find that students achieve more. So I'm not going to say that there's a direct relationship that -- because we don't have the evidence for that.

9 But I firmly believe -- I'm involved in a project right now in a high school here in Columbus in which there's an after-school program going on in which more contextual teaching strategies are being used to engage students who are not learning, and they're not learning, and they're not interested in school. And those strategies are at least at this point -- we're into November, almost -- they are involving the students, and the students are engaging in conversation and appearing to be oriented. Now, when the proficiency test is given, we'll have some comparison because, of course, they are proficiency -- proficiency tests are part of the Ohio school system and the Ohio experience. Yes? >> (Inaudible) High Schools That Work data -- >> SEARS: Yes. >> -- That does show that student engagement is correlated with higher performance on NAEP-like assessments. >> SEARS: Yes, that's exactly right. A lot of the High Schools That Work terminology is integrated learning. But, in fact, when you look at integrated learning, it really is almost the same as contextual teaching and learning. I personally think one of the -- one of the negatives around this whole area is that we haven't cleaned up our language. We call, essentially, the same thing by three different names, and I think that that makes it very difficult to claim anything for an applied type of learning or a learning that takes advantage of multiple contexts. And for me, that -- the notion of multiple contexts and problem-solving, attacking problems, and working together, are really the heart of contextual teaching and learning. And -- and it's also the heart of integrated learning. So -- and if you -- I happen to have with me a group from a high school -- the High Schools That Work of Southern Regional Education Board, and I really believe that what they're calling integrated learning is exactly the same thing that we're calling contextual learning, and they are having -- contextual teaching and learning, and they are having significant success in -- in improving the achievement of their -- of their students. >> There is some definitional differentiation. When you think about their student survey, for example -- >> SEARS: Okay. >> -- They will specifically ask students, "How often in your classes are you working with real-world problems?" And then they can correlate the answers to that specific question to student performance on the assessment. So when you get into specific questioning, it's a little bit more differentiated than just integrated learning. >> SEARS: I think what they're doing is very exciting.

10 I think they've made a -- they're a presence that is certainly being felt. Okay. Thank you. And as we go on, I hope you will ask other questions. I wanted to give -- you know, a lot of -- I would say this before I make this comment. One of the realities of trying to prepare for something like this is not having any idea who your audience is going to be. And so I made some assumptions that there would be some people that are tuning in, not the people in this room because we're -- you're a sophisticated group, but the people -- many of the people tuning in are quite sophisticated, also. But there may also be some novices in that group that don't know anything about contextual teaching and learning and don't know what it kind of looks like. And so, therefore, I put in some examples, and some are better than others, and some are more in-depth than others, but hopefully they will ring a bell. And if any of you in the audience have a comment that you want to make about any of the examples, please don't hesitate to do this -- or to do that. One of -- the first example is an agriculture teacher and a math teacher who put their students together to design a mist system for their school's greenhouse. The project involved calculating the volume of liquid and the amount of PVC pipe required for the project. So they had a problem that they were attempting to deal with, and they worked together on it, and they came up with some sort of a product at the end that they could see and that they could be measured on. So one type of an example of CT & L. Another, a textile teacher and an English teacher invited speakers in from business and industry to make presentations to their student group on workplace standards and quality control. The students, who were trying to learn the skill of note-taking and the skills of interviewing or questioning the people who were speaking, engaged in those activities, note-taking and interviewing, and so they got to practice their activity, and then they wrote a oneto three-page report. The textile teacher graded the content; the English teacher graded the grammar. This is a relatively simple example that had a clear beginning and clear ending, wasn't a long project, but was something that involved the students. And these examples are ones that I either heard or have taken out of different literatures. So they're not made-up examples. They really were done.

11 Several of them came from some literature about things that were happening, lessons that were being developed and being implemented in North Carolina and in Delaware, so I need to give those states credit for some exciting examples. Students in food nutrition, chemistry, and journalism classes investigated the metal content of foods before and after cooking, using various types of pans, cooking pans. They prepared omelettes using stainless steel, copper, cast-iron, glass, and coated cookware. The chemistry students used food samples to make chloride ions, and they tested those samples at a local university. Now, the students had studied in health the negative effects of too much aluminum in food as a result of cooking your food in an aluminum pan, for example, or too much copper in food as a result of cooking your food in it. And so they learned about the health problems that can come from that kind of a situation. They calculated the ratios of standard metal concentrations in eggs and mushrooms, which is what was in their omelette, before and after cooking. They made graphs showing the results, which were pretty dramatic. The egg samples cooked in cast-iron experienced 176% gain in iron. The mushrooms were cooked in copper, and they underwent a reduction in copper. And so the chemistry teacher was already saying, "Well, where did the copper go," and was thinking about the next problem that she could tackle based on the results of this particular experiment. So you can imagine students getting really hooked into something like this. This is a lot different than sitting there memorizing out of your chemistry book. It's a very different way of teaching. Excitement is how I kind of characterize it. Another example, student's writing skills or scores were a little poor on the proficiency. In this case, it was on the proficiency in a Delaware school. And so the English teacher and the cosmetology teacher -- and these were seniors -- were wanting to figure out a way to improve their skills. And so what they did was decided to have their students do a trade journal. And the students (inaudible) the vocational content and their technical writing skills, both. And this is a fairly -- I think this is a fairly sophisticated project, and I wanted to tell you a little bit about it. The students had to write five occupational-related articles, five of them. And this is what they had to do.

12 They had to write an interview with an expert in the field. They had to do a how-to article. They had to do a review of a book in a career or technical field. They had to do an article comparing and contrasting new products. And they had to do a persuasive article on the opportunities for career advancement. So they wrote five articles. They had to be able to publish three. So the teachers -- the teachers read the article and gave the students feedback. The students read each other's articles and gave feedback to each other, which was very helpful. Then the students were assigned to groups of four per journal. Each student accepted the responsibility of assuring quality in one phase of the production. So they might design the cover, they might do the layout of pages, they might do the proofreading, but they assumed responsibility in some aspect of that. They also had to come up with one of two exercises. They either had to create a game or a puzzle or do a full-page advertisement related to the career or technical area. So, again, this was a way to involve a student in a major unit that ended up improving their writing skill and in this case, in this school in Delaware -- and no figures were shared to substantiate this; it was hearsay that, in fact, the scores on the test -- on the proficiency test did go up. So, at any rate, a good example of contextual teaching and learning. Now, there are other ways -- other ways that -- or other kinds of examples that we might come up with. And I think there's some general ideas here, and I thought there might be some notions that some of you would have of examples that would be a way to implement contextual teaching and learning but would fall into one of these categories, generating solutions to critical problems facing the community -- can you think of something that might be a contextual teaching and learning activity that would be directed toward helping to find a solution to a problem in the community? >> Well, I'm involved a project with one of the Columbus high schools compared with an elementary school that are tackling the issue of homelessness, in terms of what they can do to be helpful in that regard, and really looking at their proficiency requirements with regard to the different levels of government and how different levels of government have responsibility for different aspects of the agencies for the homeless. And so they've been actually talking with people at City Hall about that problem and different aspects so that they could have a part in trying to do something about it. At Fort Hayes, they happen to have an academic and a vocational or career-technical high school.

13 Actually, they are involving the dental students in cleaning the teeth of those who are homeless. I mean, we are down to something very, very practical, and yet it really relates to their -- >> SEARS: The entire school? >> The entire school got involved. They won a national service learning award for it last year. >> SEARS: I can well imagine. >> Yes. >> SEARS: That's a worthy project and a very good example. I'll have to find out more about that so I can use it as an example. Very good. Anybody else think of anything? What about the other two categories? The second one certainly intrigued me. When you think about what's going on in the world right now, you cannot tune into television without seeing someone interviewed on CNN that has another perspective of what's happening in Afghanistan or why this tragedy occurred. And I'm an old history teacher, and as I watch some of this, I think, wow, the teachable moments in the classroom. There are so many opportunities to hook kids up with people that they could interview in the community to better understand a religion that we know very little about, to better understand a country that we know almost nothing about, and to understand the plight of many of the people who are starving in that particular situation who had no direct involvement in what happened on September the 11th. So certainly that area is just ripe for teachers to work together on and do a contextual kind of activity. >> If you ask the students what they want to know or learn in a given class, that will lead to a problem-based situation because most people want to know something because of a problem that is posed in their own life that it would solve if they learned about X, Y, or Z. And it reminds me that Dr. Laster at OSU uses a technique related to that. She requires an entrance card to get into her class, and an entrance card -- and this would be every class -- is a question. You have to come to class with a question related to the day's content. >> SEARS: That's a very good idea. I'm going to have to swipe that, try that -- try that in my classes. That sounds like a very good idea. I've had my classes involved in the third category, delivering a community service and then reflecting on it. When they come into the program, I ask them to choose a student out in school that may not be doing as well as they might and to mentor and work with that student for a significant period of time and to keep a journal as they do that and to share -- then they're put together on

14 teams in our program, and they share those experiences with each other as they're going through them, and they meet the families and really get to know the situation that that particular child is really experiencing. And I can tell you that the child doesn't benefit nearly as much as my counseling students benefit from that in-depth opportunity to understand one individual who they really had no relationship with prior to the time that activity began. So, again, there's a lot of examples that we could discuss. And let me go from some of these examples into just kind of a general summary of the kind of benefits that I believe, from the literature, that this -- that CT & L actually does have for students. And I am conservative in what I would claim. I don't believe that schooling is for high scores on proficiency tests. That is not what learning is to me. And so that's not always what I'm worried about. And I know that in today's world, that's a probably dangerous position to take because everybody else is worried about the proficiency scores. And I do believe that through some of the work that is being done by SREB, it's going to be very clear that contextual kinds of activities do increase test scores also. But I believe that what I've seen as I've worked with contextual teaching and learning is that certainly higher order thinking and problem solving is enhanced. I see it in my own students. I see what they do with students in the field, in schools, and I am convinced that they do benefit from this kind of instruction. Promotes student engagement and involvement to a very -- at a very high level, a very high level. Students that you almost see as bored or uninterested, immediately upon being given something that is real and something that is just exciting to them, will get involved and take a leadership role. And that taught me a lot as I watched it. Certainly a benefit is that it relates what students -- the student is learning to the real world. And I think that, in and of itself, is very important as a motivator. And if I can measure whether a student really knows something, I feel much better than I -- as an instructor than I do if they can hand me or regurgitate back to me an essay that says they know all of these facts. I want to know whether they can do it. In our field, it's not -- in the field of counselor ed, you can memorize and regurgitate theory and look good on paper, but the reality is you must be able to do what it is that we expect you to do. I can't put school counselors into a school because they have a high score on a test.

15 I have to put them in there with the confidence that they can counsel, that they can help students, and -- help students learn how to problem solve and help students set directions in their lives. So, again, I -- I have seen through my own teaching that the authentic method of assessment gives me a lot better idea whether my students have learned what I wanted them to learn. This is -- to engage in contextual teaching and learning and -- of course, a person in our audience made that point just a little bit ago. To engage in contextual teaching and learning is not easy. You do need to be very planful, and it takes a great deal of time, in fact, to develop the kind of lessons that we're talking about or units that we're talking about. And so you need teachers that are knowledgeable about the workplace. And many teachers, academic teachers, really don't have a lot of work experience. They may have gone straight from college into their teaching, and -- or into the classroom. And so they don't know what happens in business and industry, and they really are not real efficient at making those connections to -- from their content to the real world. So externships are very, very valuable. Has anybody in this room experienced an externship? You literally -- Sandy, you have? >> It's fascinating. >> SEARS: And you're very knowledgeable about the world of work, but you still felt you gained from it? >> Oh, yes, tremendously. >> SEARS: Well, if you haven't ever -- if you haven't put yourself through an experience like that, like an externship, I would encourage you to think about it. There's a -- Al Phelps, from the University of Wisconsin, has done a little booklet called teacher -- "Teacher Learning in the Workplace and Community," and he lists some things in this book -- booklet that talks about -- or that describes what teachers say they benefited -- how they benefited from workplace learning. He said they believed it helped enhance school-community relations. They felt that locating real-world problems and illustrations -- it helped them locate real-world problems and illustrations that they could use in their classrooms, helped them develop insight on performance assessment, because they began to see how their content was being carried out and realized that, you know, they might be teaching that content, but that content wasn't going to be -- they weren't measuring whether that content was learned in quite the same way the workplace was measuring it. They believed they learned a great deal more about economics, which I thought was an interesting observation. I wouldn't have necessarily thought that was something that they would

16 have reported, but they did. They believed that they increased their value. They valued their own content more, as a result of having watched what -- how it was used in the workplace, again, not necessarily something that I might have thought about. They felt like they updated their technical knowledge and their expertise. Now, those are just a few of them, particular things that teachers felt that these externships were very, very valuable for them. Teachers really need -- on the second one I started to address here a few moments ago, teachers really need time to collaborate and plan. When you develop lessons, you definitely have to be together. A lot of the examples I gave you were examples of two teachers working together because I know that that is something that is greatly desired in career and technical education. It's very important for the academic and the career and technical teachers to form relationships and help each other do a better job of instructing students. But it doesn't always need to be a team of teachers; it can be done singly. But it's a lot more fun if it's in a team of teachers. And people learn, again, because of contextual teaching and learning. Learning is a social process, and people learn together and from each other when you give them that opportunity. And the old adage of two heads are better than one is exactly right. You get ideas from each other, you get motivated by each other, and -- but this is very time-consuming. As I've talked to some of the individuals who have run projects in which they have tried to bring teachers back in and take them through externships, give them time to develop the materials that they need to -- the curriculums that they need to teach, what, in fact, they find is it's an extremely time-consuming process, and that makes it expensive. Yes? >> (Inaudible) (inaudible) (inaudible). We had made the bad assumption that teachers would just automatically know how to work together, and that they'd know how to plan integrated lessons. And we had to back way up and get them to, first of all, get to know each other because these are people who may have worked in the same building for 20 years, but they never saw what each other did; they didn't know what each other did. And they didn't necessarily trust somebody else to come in as a peer and observe what they were doing. So we had to back up and establish trusting relationships between these folks before they could even start to think about how they could plan to teach together. That was a big lesson for us.

17 >> SEARS: That's a really important point, Sheila. And I remember hearing my friends at the University of Wisconsin who were working on the professional development project, and still are, say exactly the same thing, that it was a lesson for them to realize that teachers often have not learned how to work together. And so there was an important component that needed to be added, and that was how do you work together? And so it sounds like you experienced exactly the same thing. Yes? >> Do you find (inaudible) that the amount of time necessary for collaboration, does it tend to diminish as teachers have more experience in working together? >> SEARS: I'm going to tell you what I know from the University of Wisconsin, comments from some of the folks up there, and that's that, in fact, it does diminish in time, to some degree, but it still is, at least at this point in their findings, it's still a very significant amount of time. They learn to work together differently as teams, they learn to help each other in ways that they didn't know -- you know, that they didn't use before. But it is still very time-consuming. Again, it's kind of interesting from a teacher ed standpoint, that teachers come out of teacher education programs not knowing how to work together. And I think that's one of the -- or not knowing how to plan this kind of instruction. Now, having said that, I want to also say that that has changed, and that is changing, and we saw evidence of that changing. The professional development school movement has caused many more teacher educators to be placing students out in the field, and richer units are being developed as a result of the interaction of classroom teachers with the teacher educators and with the students in training. But there's a lot of colleges of education around the country, and a lot of them are not using professional development schools or some of the more long-range interventions. Many of the professional development schools -- some of them are in five-year programs or master's programs, and so there's not a lot of those kinds of situations across the country. Teachers isolate very quickly, as many of you know, and they're very used to having -- shutting their door and doing whatever, and because teaching is not a public act, they just don't seem to have learned how to work together -- and they don't learn how to work together on the job. So -- I would like to put -- oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> ALTSCHULD: As you've been talking, my experience in doing this indicates that schools aren't organized for the team teaching, for the planning time, and so on, so you can train teachers to do this, but

18 you're putting them into an environment that really isn't organized like a business that will break away the time to do something as a team and so on. So I think there's really a fundamental problem. It's a lot more than training. And the fundamental problem is that the time element is way underestimated, and the structure to support it is not there at all. >> SEARS: Yes. Yes, I agree with that. I certainly -- and I appreciate you bringing up the point because schools aren't -- they aren't structured. They aren't structured to change, either. I mean, that's other part of this that really presents the practicing person with a dilemma, and that's how do you -- if you hear something you think you want to do, it's going to take resources, and it's going to take a different structure in the building, plus people that want to work with you, how do you -- how do you make that happen? >> ALTSCHULD: I think it would be interesting to study this from the perspective of schools trying to do it without project money because the projects -- it's usually an outside project -- >> SEARS: Yes. >> ALTSCHULD: -- and then the money provides the free time and so on. >> SEARS: Yes. >> ALTSCHULD: Take away that resource, and sometimes you don't really see the (inaudible). >> SEARS: I think that's exactly right. You make a very good point. Sheila? >> One of the things that we discovered early on was that if you've got a high school that's got a seven-, eight-, or nine-period day with 1,000 kids, it's virtually impossible to take this approach. And so what we've seen schools do instead, which is your first bullet point, is reorganizing the school day so you don't have 40-minute periods eight or nine times during the day. You structure to, say, a four-by-four block schedule or an A-B schedule so that teachers have extended periods of time with students that they can use constructively, not like, "Oh, we'll do two chapters in a period instead of one chapter." No, that's not what that means, you know, but how do you really use that time constructively? The other issue is this drives home the point about small learning communities because when you've got a high school of 1,200 kids or so, how in the world can you do contextual teaching and learning when you don't know that all of your kids are going to be the same across a particular project? So if you drive it down to a smaller group of kids, either organizing by career clusters or houses or academies or whatever you want to call

19 it, and now you've got 100 kids and a core group of teachers, you can do this kind of work, and it's much more manageable, and you don't necessarily have to have a lot more money to do it once you've got it. >> SEARS: That's a very positive and hopeful expression, and I hope you're right. I think -- I think any time, anymore, that you buy teachers time to engage in professional development, that, in fact, you do spend a lot of money. I mean, there just isn't -- isn't any way. You do. And you do need to -- I need to respond to a question in the back. Go ahead. >> Larry (Inaudible) would like to know how learner-centered behavior (inaudible) CT & L. >> SEARS: Learner-centered behavior -- and I'm going to interpret what Larry means as behavior that places the learner at the center of instruction, and when you are having -- when you have students engaged in problem-based learning in other contexts, working together, the learner is at the center of that. You add, then, to it that the student has some choice in what the student is learning, and you very clearly, through CT & L, can have the student as the learner -- as the center of learning, and that is really something I probably should have mentioned in some of my characteristics of CT & L because the learner is certainly at the center of what we're trying to do. You -- also, by building on what the individual -- the individual student knows is another way of -- and the experiences that that individual student has had is another way of putting the student at the center. Let me kind of -- I know that we're getting into the question-and-answer period. Let me just make a couple other brief comments, and then we'll go ahead and segue into the question-and-answer. I think that was a very subtle and clever way of keeping me on track, and I appreciate that, so... The -- I guess there's really not too much more to say about this, other than it's not just providing teachers time and putting them out on an externship. When you really ask teachers to teach this differently, they will require professional development in other areas, also. And they will, just like students, begin to generate wants and desires on their -- on their own. There will be now a topic that they want to know more about. Cooperative learning is an example. Do they get involved? Maybe they decide they would really like to have some workshops in that area. So this is educational reform.

20 It is trying to change what's happening in today's schools. I want to point out two resources that I think are really quite good. These -- these have to do more -- there are a lot of good Web sites out there, but these two Web sites happen to deal with professional development of practicing teachers, and so I thought that they were particularly pertinent to today's discussion. And the first one are colleagues that I mentioned here from the University of Wisconsin, and they've been heavily involved in contextual teaching and learning. And then the other one is Bowling Green State University here in Ohio, who has a very rather project in which they're trying to deliver professional development via technology, and I think you could learn something from both of those sites. I've already cited a book that I felt was very good, and it's -- it's largely around integrated learning. But as you read it, I think that you'll see that it is very much the same concepts that are included in contextual teaching and learning. With that, I'm going to turn the overhead off, and I'm going to see if there are questions both from the audience here and any people that have written in with questions. Yes? >> LEWIS: I'll take the microphone. >> SEARS: Thank you. >> LEWIS: When you consider the amount of time it takes to get across a certain concept or a certain area, direct instruction versus contextualized, and you consider the amount of preparation which is necessary for contextualized versus direct instruction, it seems you'd have to have a much greater learning gain to justify that extra cost. And you've already spoken to the fact we don't have really good data. Do you think there is the potential for that much greater learning gain? >> SEARS: You know, I would be optimistic and say I think that there is certainly the potential for an equal learning gain to direct instruction. The part, though, that I think I would stress is the kind of person we're trying to educate. We're trying to develop people who can think on their own and who are willing to take responsibility for their own learning. I don't know a great deal about (inaudible) engaging in (inaudible). So I think that you're really talking about the difficulty that it takes to develop the curriculum that one needs to implement these kinds of things. >> In keeping with the idea that the structure may be the problem, my experience has been you can't just turn the students loose with the authentic problem without also coming back and helping them articulate what did they learn from it. >> SEARS: Yes. >> Sometimes they have to be helped and even sometimes told what they