Jen Groff is an educational engineer, researcher, and designer, and a PhD candidate at the The Education Arcade and the MIT Media Lab. Her work focuses on the design and development of learning technologies, the redesign of learning environments and systems, and engineering new learning data models and architectures. Jen is also the co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and most recently was the Executive Director of the national Playful Learning initiative at the Learning Games Network. She holds a B.S. in Elementary Education from Millersville University, a M.Ed. in Educational Technology from the University of Delaware, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the UK in 2009.
Jen is a former K-12 educator, and for her innovative teaching in the classroom she was named one of the first Microsoft Innovative Teacher Leaders in 2005. She is the author of numerous frameworks on innovation in education systems, transformation, and design over educational reform—including the i5 framework and the ‘whole-mindedness’ pedagogical approach. Her current work is the LearningGraph—a platform that supports a universal model of learning progressions and standards to support learning technologies and education systems.
When and how did you become interested in Education and Learning?
Ever since I was a kid. “Playing school” and helping others learn was a big part of my childhood. Even at a young age I was always reflecting on my own learning, which now I would call being metacognitive, I just didn’t know that at the time. So understanding the nature of learning and how to support others in their own learning has always been a passion of mine. It wasn’t until I got my own classroom, as a teacher, that actually really made me interested in ‘education’—because I saw so many blocks to the natural curiosity and passion that all children are born with. So my interest isn’t so much in “fixing” education, but rather engineering different environments and pathways that don’t get in the way of that and allow learners to come back to this natural state of learning.
What is the Education Arcade and how is it changing the learning landscape?
The Education Arcade is a research group led by Prof. Eric Klopfer that engages in a range of work to support this idea of “playful learning”. This includes the research and development of learning games and environments, simulations and programming tools, curriculum, and professional development tools and materials. The Ed Arcade was really one of the first groups exploring how games and playful designs could interface with emerging technologies to support deeper, more collaborative learning and immersive experiential education. 15 years ago, the use of games in classrooms was still challenging for some to embrace. But today, that perception is very different. Thanks in part to the work of our lab and others, games are not only much more openly embraced in education, but importantly, they have really opened up the conversation about the nature of learning, assessment, learning data modeling, and much more—because games can be powerful contained models of complex learning environments which allow us to more easily grasp and unpack the nature of learning. Just in the last few years this has specifically made a big impact on the field of big data in education, and the pursuit of a future where learning and data are coherently integrated for a more seamless experience for the learner—hopefully, finally, freeing us from the tyranny of high-stakes standardized testing.
How do you envision the LearningGraph helping shape education in the future?
My hope and aspiration, is that it might do so in a few of ways…but first, to explain what the LearningGraph is: it is an open-source research initiative that uses systems engineering processes to reengineer the way we model and manage learning data and learning construct models—in other words, the what of education. This shows up now as a core pillar of the system in the way of curriculum, standards, and even assessments. The way we model learning data has a deep impact on all parts of the system, and as a result, ultimately the everyday experiences of learners. So concerning ourselves with how this pillar evolves (or transforms) is important.
So, First, I hope that the LearningGraph project can inspire and offer insights on ways we might view this pillar of the system, in more coherence and complexity that reflects its reality, so that we may more adequately bring the rigor and modern tools for working with this type of data in today’s world. Not just because I hope to see deep improvements in the way we offer public education, but because I think deep reengineering of this space can help open up learning, and inform the development of very different ways of supporting learners and learning that does not involve public education systems.
Second, I hope the complex systems engineering methods we are using also demonstrate the need for using these methods more often in our work in education—which have been embraced by many other domains, but education has been slow to get onboard, even though education is arguably one of society’s most complex and challenging social systems.
Finally, I hope to further establish the project as an ongoing initiative that serves as a research-based, open-source thought leader in this space. Publishers and assessment companies already influence this pillar of the system, arguably, too much; and too many innovations in this part of the system become proprietary technologies of private companies. So, much like the W3C at MIT serves as an independent thought leader of standards for the future of the web, I hope that the LearningGraph can do the same for education and for the ways we support learners to take control of their own learning outside of education.
As a former teacher, how do you feel about the use of technology in today’s classrooms?
To be candid, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. I’ve had the great privilege to work with very innovative designers and technologies over the past decade, so I’ve seen the incredible experiences and learning that can be generated through the use of these technologies. But in the everyday landscape of schools, technology is too often a distraction that is treated as a “shiny object” that gives the false impression that you’re innovating and really delivering powerful learning when so often it’s not really. Technology can help open the conversation to transformation in learning environments, and certainly help deliver more powerful models of learning, but the driver has got to be purposefully designing the type of learning experiences you value, and then ultimately an environment and system that helps to deliver that.
What is your favorite thing about working at MIT?
So many things really…as I’m sure most people who have worked here will say, it makes going anywhere after MIT difficult because there’s no place like it here. I still struggle to put into words what that special essence is, but I think it’s the type of people that are drawn to MIT—a special combination of an engineer/designer/dreamer mindset—and the way in which we come together to tackle problems. It feels like getting to work with a “dream team” every day, on big challenges and opportunities that face our world and society. Having come here early in my career, at the age of 25, it very much shaped who I am, how I think, and how I approach the work. All these years later, I couldn’t imagine doing my PhD anywhere else.