Kentucky P20 Innovation Lab: A Partnership for Next Generation Learning
LEXINGTON, KY - Anyone concerned about the state of education in Kentucky and whether the Commonwealth is adequately preparing future generations will want to take note of today's rollout of .
Under the initiative, the brainchild of UK College of Education Dean Mary John O'Hair and detailed during a morning press conference at the state capitol in Frankfort, UK is partnering with Kentucky public schools, businesses, community leaders, higher education, industry and government to transform classrooms to engage learners at an early age and create a pipeline of students well-prepared to go to college and obtain careers matching their skills and interests, according to UK officials.
The far reaching program is a response to legislation passed in the 2009 General Assembly. Sponsored by Sen. Ken Winters (R-Murray) and Senate President David Williams (R-Burkesville), Senate Bill 1 mandates closer cooperation between the state's schools and Kentucky colleges and universities in an attempt to lower the numbers of school children who need remediation.
45 percent of students being admitted to Kentucky's public universities show up in need of at least one remedial course and about 33 percent need remediation in two or more courses, noted Dr. Robert King, President of the Council on Postsecondary Education. "Students who may have been getting very good grades in high school, but in courses that were not preparing them for college, show up on our campuses under-prepared and are very frustrated by that - understandably," he said. "As a consequence, they may spend a semester taking classes none of which generate credits toward their degree. If they're successful they can move on and start taking credit-generating courses. But for those who are not it becomes not only a great disappointment but very frustrating to them. Kids that might otherwise have the aptitude and the capacity to go into engineering or any other professional field are discouraged as a consequence of showing up unprepared," he said.
UK has committed $1.5 million over the next three years to launch the program, designed to "provide the missing link between cutting-edge innovation that exists at a major research university and the P-12 setting," according to Dean O'Hair. "We want to break down barriers to collaboration and promote a two-way generation of knowledge so that innovation supports educators and reaches students. When you walk the halls of any school you see some kids who seem disengaged. We need to enrich curriculum to energize and empower students born into a digital age and provide pathways that will lead to a love of learning," she said.
Educators say the learning environment has changed little even as a rapid evolution of digital technology has moved today's students from the passive consumption of information from textbooks to the world of interactive media.
When today's 24-year-old entered kindergarten in 1990, the World Wide Web was invented. By the time they reached middle school, the Palm Pilot was making headlines. Then came high school and Napster and the iPod. And by the time they reached a college campus, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media were all but taken for granted - even as older generations struggled to keep pace.
On average, today's college student will have spent 5,000 hours reading and 10,000 hours playing a video game, according to one study. Another, the latest Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that 97 percent of teens play video games. Yet, while researchers have demonstrated that gaming can improve student motivation and increase the pleasure and engagement in learning, classrooms have seen little renovation to accommodate these trends.
The result all too often is a disconnect between what was taught in public elementary and high schools, and what is demanded on college campuses.
"Part of the purpose of SB1 is to eliminate that so that students know that if they do everything that is expected of them in high school they'll have confidence that when they get to college they're ready to start taking credit generating courses," said King.
That's important not only to students, but also to a university president operating under a legislative mandate to lead UK to "Top 20" status among American research institutions by 2020.
"The Kentucky P20 Innovation Lab is precisely the type of creative, collaborative effort that must be a hallmark of a Top 20 public research university," said UK President Lee T. Todd Jr. "It is not good enough to simply conduct world-class research on our campus. We must seek ways to make sure our campus breakthroughs hit the ground in Kentucky and change lives in every Kentucky community. This lab will help us to do that. It provides us a unique vehicle to deliver cutting-edge discoveries from UK's 17 colleges into schools across the Commonwealth."
A goal of the new partnerships between UK, P-12 schools and other universities in the state is to create new professional development opportunities to elevate higher-order thinking in the classroom. It will be important, leaders say, to convene Kentucky schools, businesses, community leaders, higher education, industry and government in frequent innovation summits.
Although broader in scope, the Kentucky P20 Innovation Lab is modeled on the University of Oklahoma's K20 Center. The Oklahoma center began development in 1995 and grew over the past 14 years under the leadership of O'Hair, who served as vice provost for school and community partnerships at Oklahoma State before being named dean of the UK College of Education in August 2009.
Over the past five years, schools participating in the Oklahoma K-20 Center have consistently seen increases in student learning by 74 percent more than the state's average increase on the Oklahoma Academic Performance Index (API), which includes standardized tests, ACT scores, and dropout rates.
In Oklahoma, it was discovered that a "whole-school" philosophy, supporting not just teachers and students, but also bringing superintendents, principals, parents and community leaders into the fold, helped to ensure that transformation was launched successfully and is sustained over time, O'Hair said.
The impact of the new Kentucky program would be sustained by providing qualified high school students with proposed P20 Innovation Scholarships. The scholars, who could choose any of UK's majors, would return to their hometowns during college to develop projects to meet unmet needs in their communities. The idea is to bring the Kentucky P20 Innovation Lab full-circle and enhance students' understanding of how they, as future professionals, can support P-12 education.
SB 1 also mandated a move toward a new testing and accountability system that will measure individual student achievement over a period of time. The goal is to provide the means to understand how Kentucky students are doing compared to each other and with students nationally. Last August, the Kentucky Department of Education, the Council on Postsecondary Education and the Education Professional Standards Boards formed a P-20 Data Collaborative. The goal of the group is to create a longitudinal student data system that spans a student's entire educational career.
Through a series of grants, the three agencies are to coordinate efforts to compile a P-20 data system, a data warehouse of information from pre-kindergarten through college and beyond. This goal is to make it possible to link student, teacher, postsecondary and certification data so that informed decisions about important strategies can be formulated.
A convergence of expertise
As UK was courting Dean O'Hair to bring her Oklahoma experience to bear in Kentucky, Dr. King was in Arizona where leaders were struggling with educational challenges similar to Kentucky's. The former chancellor of the State University of New York -the nation's largest system of higher education- King had gone on to serve as president and CEO of the Arizona Community Foundation, a statewide organization focused on education, economic development and scientific research.
In late 2008, he was recruited to become the third president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.
"Shortly before I came to Kentucky from Arizona," King recalls, "I was invited to meet with a group of legislators who were looking for ideas about what they could do to improve education in Arizona. The Foundation that I had been leading had just completed this very elaborate study of the Arizona public education system. And we had made a series of recommendations in that report. So when I got to this meeting with these legislators and they asked 'what can we do,' I said, 'well, one of the things you could start with would be to pass a law that directs the Arizona Department of Education to adopt rigorous standards that are internationally competitive and that align what kids are learning in K-12 with what our colleges and universities are expecting. I don't know that the Arizona legislature ever adopted a bill like that, but I got here to Kentucky a few months later and the Kentucky legislature was doing exactly that. So, I was thrilled."