While browsing online for the Charlie Brown teacher voice as a joke to a friend, I came across this fantastic video about the different ways children approach a book report. I remember book reports being one of the most popular assessments when I was in school. Now, I see my niece struggling with them. She hates them and my sister and her often fight about her finishing them correctly.

Let’s look at the learners…

I really like this video because I think we are familiar with these different types of learners in our classes. Most students aren’t wild about homework. In the video, even the ones who get the homework all respond, “Homework, yuck!!” The video shows four different approaches to the homework:

Lucy

Charles Schultz was so in tune with children.

Ask a parent what their long term goals are for their children, and they will often reply with terms that describe a child’s character – they want their kids to be creative, kind, thoughtful, hard working and just. You’d be hard pressed to find a parent who will say that their long term goals for their children involve being compliant, docile, silent and dull.

And yet, many traditional classroom practices encourage exactly that. Grades silence kids from thinking deeply about their learning, while behavior programs are happiest when the kids are seen rather than heard, and testing labels collaboration as cheating. We send all kinds of conflicting messages to kids when our long-term goals are at odds with our practices.

I am struck by the contrast Joe Bower presents in these two paragraphs. Both parents and teachers want the same outcomes and customarily agree that the long term goals and both believe this can be achieved by young people exhibiting diametrically opposite behaviors and values.

The compliance, docility, silence and dullness Joe refers to is presented as essential training for the repetitive nature of most work. Perhaps, but there is far less solitary, dull repetitive work in the world than we imagine. I think the spectrum of work includes a great deal of complexity, variety and challenge. Twelve years relentlessly preparing for the assembly line may be a bit too much but there is still a call for this behavior. It is also genuinely necessary for learning moments like explanation and personal reflection. There is a problem. Teachers generally confuse the behaviors desirable in the explanation for those desirably for the remainder of the learning. After all this time we have got stop doing this.

I’m sure this is not a new thought, I’ve taught too long for that to be true, but I rediscovered it recently in conversation with my intern. I actually have more time to work with students during the day because I am not center stage trying to talk to all of them. Micro-management is time consuming. Maintaining natural behaviors like silence, focus and stillness for unnatural lengths of time is also time consuming. The release of tension experienced in moments of collective quiet and stillness slowly transforms into an almost insufferable tension as it draws out. Traditional classroom practice has no balance. It wants no balance and oddly, many people like it that way.

“The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage.”

-Howard Gardner

Joe Bower offers a powerful analogy that illuminates the stupidity of curriculum coverage. Unless you think school is intended to grade the population so only the elite few are left on the bus, then you have to reflectively discard compulsive curriculum coverage. Read Joe Bower’s story.

New ideas usually require time and social connectivity; 1 + 1 = 3. This is a powerful reminder that we need to give our students time to generate their own ideas and an opportunity to network with others as they do it. All too often we sever connections in the classroom and impose artificial time constraints on reflection. Solitude and stopwatches are less of an impediment to identifying and recalling facts in school – particularly if we keep the content simple. Surely we have moved beyond that educational goal. We want problem solvers and higher order thinking. Johnson reminds us that eureka moments are rare and most steps forward come from collisions of half formed ideas. Open connections in your classrooms.

Welcome to the Sask Teaching Network wiki!

We are in a province that is small on numbers, but big on open space, in more ways than one. There are teachers out there that don’t see each other face to face very often, but would like to share with each other – to learn from each other – all we have to do is contribute. The power of one – one contribution each. The power of many – if every teacher contributed one lesson, unit, activity, idea – we would have an accumulation of 12 000 items. Doesn’t sound so hard does it? Let’s go!

Where to Start?

Try to put each new item on a separate page – otherwise the pages will get huge – at least they would if this thing catches on! Then put a link to that page under unit that it belongs in. This is an open wiki, anyone can edit it, so go hard. Feel free to add whatever you want, including to the navigation on the side (ie – want some pages about conferences, PLCs, PD, etc – add away)

Today the north half of Prairie South School Division met in Moose Jaw to work together as grade-alike learning communities. Cycles, cycles; when I began my career in 1983 (well it started two years earlier in Nigeria) the province was moving into a period of dramatic curriculum reform. Exciting times for me as a young teacher. I embraced the changes with little reservation. Reform has returned.

The documents we worked with were almost a summary. The complete package is on line (and still under development). The new curriculum is flexible and far more student centered. Ownership is intended and to facilitate this students need to understand the outcomes. Today we met to take the outcomes, what a student is expected to know and be able to do, and “unpack” the indicators. Indicators are examples of ways students might be asked to demonstrate achievement. “Unpack” essentially means translating the language of the curriculum document into student friendly language. This took us much of the day. Why the indicators were not written in student friendly language in the first place remains a mystery to me but I think it was time well spent.

Hundreds of teachers were gathered for this and we only commenced the process for a single course in each year. Our southern colleagues will continue this task later this month and we will return to it twice more. The process is being carried out in one manner or another across Saskatchewan. That seems too fragmented to me and the effort is focussed on Math and Language Arts at the moment. I predict curriculum renewal exhaustion before we tackle half of the curriculum.

Something needs to be done to bring all this together. I’d like to promote a wiki where we can collaborate. I think wikipedia gives us a vision of what is possible. saskteachingnetwork has fallen into disuse I think and the original team deserves help. “Unpacking” indicators, identifying key concepts, and developing assessments for these student learning outcomes is the teacher’s responsibility. We could bring that together in a wikispace built by hundreds of teachers. Think about it and spread the word.

These days, the homework I give isn’t based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do ‘at home’ to reinforce something we did in class, but rather it’s a matter of asking the students to do something necessary to prepare themselves for the next class. Homework becomes an act of preparation — and hopefully sparks some anticipation not for seeing what you ‘got right or wrong’, not for seeing if you can jump through that next hoop, but anticipation for taking part in the next day’s discussion, activities, and learning.

There is a good deal of sense here. We don’t need to be dogmatic about homework and we certainly need to be reflective about why we are asking for additional work. Homework helps to provide the continuity and authenticity between the constrained school day and the larger life of the learner. Classroom activity is not simply repeated at home as some sort of extension on the school day. Instead, the learning continues through either anticipation and preparation or through authentic application in original contexts.

This one is all about physicists and yet it seemed to reflect educators as well. Perhaps I am just caught up in the way extreme problems like education have been reduced to simple problems by both those within public education and without. Like medieval astronomers struggling to reconcile cosmology with their simple earth-centric models, policy makers either ignore the contradictory data or adopt untenable explanations to support their shaky premise. I’m something of an absurdest philosophically so not being sure what the nature of our educational problem is really not that much of a stress.

It’s always been an uphill battle to bring social media to larger companies and organizations. In the case of Dilbert’s company, that uphill battle is more like a mountain.

My son’s school division blocks YouTube. I have been working in such a good environment at the Prairie South School Division that I easily forget what the challenges are for much of the educational community. This fall I am joining a Professional Learning Network of Western Canadian educators locally led by Dean Shareski. It has the potential to become an intense connected learning experience. This cartoon is dedicated to Joe Bower; keep the faith!

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely… unless of course you lack motivation…