At the end of his article about an innovative offensive scheme called the A-11 being implemented by one high school football team in California, ESPN.com’s Michael Weinreb writes: “And while I do not know if the A-11 can challenge all our assumptions, or if it is merely a lark, I do know that it accomplishes one very important thing: It reminds us that nothing in the universe can ever remain static. Not even football.”

So, clearly, Weinreb has never considered the institution of public schooling.

That oversight notwithstanding…

Just before I launched this blog, I wrote over on LeaderTalk about an ESPN article by Gregg Easterbrook where he explored a different innovative football strategy: no punting or rarely punting.  Easterbrook pointed to research and simulations that rather clearly demonstrated the benefits of a no-punt or rarely punt approach.  Yet, he could only find one high school team that was willing to adopt the strategy.  Why the reluctance in the face of compelling evidence/data?  As I wrote in the earlier post, Easterbrook offers two reasons: “First, ‘because that’s what we always do.’ Second, because if coaches order fourth-down tries that fail, they will be blamed, whereas if coaches order punts, the players will be blamed for the loss.“  More succinctly, coaches are risk and blame averse.

Now, we have Weinreb’s report on the A-11, a radical offensive strategy in football.  Weinreb wonders about the viability of the A-11, but does not directly speculate on why coaches will or will not adopt it.  Rather, more philosophically, he writes: “The dominant paradigm has always tended toward conservatism; in the previous century, it took several decades for the forward pass to gain acceptance. Change is frowned upon, even as it is surreptitiously embraced by coaches, who will plagiarize almost any scheme that might potentially save their jobs.”

Conservatism as the dominant paradigm…change is frowned upon…save their jobs.  Sound familiar educationalists?

If you want to see what the A-11 looks like in action, check out the following video:

Tags: education, football, innovation

Well, other than “technology,” if I had to choose five tags to describe myself, sports, education and law would be in the top 5.  So, imagine my surprise when I was pointed to this video of a Malcolm Gladwell speech/presentation (what is it that he does exactly?) covering those three areas.  The main topic of his speech is the mismatch problem; the idea that in making hiring decisions employers regularly use metrics that are very poor predictors of success within their particular area of employment.  The substance of the presentation is certainly interesting, but here’s what I want to do with this video:

I want to use it as part of a major project for a doctoral level educational research course.  It’d be like a fact-checking exercise.  Students would have to listen to/watch the segment about hiring teachers and note each claim that Gladwell makes which is presumably research-based (i.e. that reducing class sizes from 22 to 16 will lead to increases in achievement of 5 percentile points).  Then, for each claim, they would have to find the research that either supports or refutes his claim.  The students would synthesize the research and write up their findings.  That would be fun/cool, right?

Tags: education, Gladwell, law, research, Sports

*teachers would choose not to participate in school activities because they are unsatisfied with the terms of the last three years of their contract worth an overall $25 million.

*the best teachers would be drafted onto the faculties of the lowest performing schools, and we’d spend a lot of time trying to prognosticate who is the best prospect and who has the most “upside potential” as a teacher.

*after facilitating a particularly good lesson, teachers would seek each other out and engage in a chest bump, a high five and/or some group celebration.

*brilliant statistical thinkers would spend incredible amounts of time figuring out how to analyze the schooling endeavor and to determine which schools and teachers are the best (I promise we’d do MUCH better than “number of AP courses per student“). In fact, we could judge teachers based on their VORT (value over replacement teacher).

*principals would be fired four years after leading the school to the highest possible level.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it to you, my readers. What did I leave out?

Tags: education, Sports

The link below is to a video of a segment from a Bob Costas show that aired last night. If you’ve come to my blog and know what I tend to write about, even if you’re not a sports fan, you’ll be riveted by this video. It’s worth spending the full 18 minutes watching it (although you could probably skip Braylon Edwards’ comments; poor guy got caught between Lincoln and Douglas). The video speaks to SO many issues, that it’s hard to know where to start with my reflections. First, the link:

[NOTE: Before you click on the link, please know that there is language in the segment that may not be suitable for your workplace (depends on where you work, I suppose) and is probably not suitable for the ears of children]

VIDEO

Now my thoughts:

• I really enjoyed reading Friday Night Lights. It’s the only Buzz Bissinger book I’ve ever read. And, his credibility as a sportswriter/journalist is fairly impeccable. But, OMG…what a crumudgeon! He doesn’t get it; not one bit. He could be every old school administrator, every old academic, every old [insert education professional here].
• I think Will Leitch was caught off guard. Had he known what Bissinger’s take was going to be, I’m sure he’d have been better prepared to eloquently argue the place of and relevance of the blogosphere.
• It’s hilarious that Costas was the moderator. He’s an admitted traditionalist. He railed against the wildcard system for baseball playoffs and was dead wrong (IMHO). This was like having E.D. Hirsch moderate a debate between John Dewey and Edward Thorndike.

I was going to write more; lots more. But, I think I’ll let the video speak for itself…

Tags: blogs, media

So, here’s an article about the latest sports controversy. Bathing suits that may very well give swimmers a speed advantage (18 of the 19 world records broken recently were done by swimmers wearing this type of suit). Apparently, there are naysayers…”no fair; that’s a competitive advantage.”

Huh?  Competitive advantage?  Is a technology that is available to anybody (I suppose there are issues of cost and equity, but do you really think any world-class athlete is concerned with those sorts of issues?) a competitive advantage?  This reminds me of the push against, and the eventual illegalization (is that a word?) of squared grooves for golf clubs.  “No fair; it makes players too good.” 

I’m going to have to add this to my lexicon and thinking about education and technology.  Certainly, part of the resistance, at least unconsciously, must be adults who don’t want kids to have it easier than they did (”kid, we used to have to walk 3 miles in the snow up hills to get to school!“).  Learning is not supposed to be easy, so we must resist technological doping in education.

Tags: competition, doping, education, technology