Wednesday, 17. March 2010
I should not be surprised that embedding a Googledoc poll into my blog works without any difficulty. I am becoming excited by the possibilities. This quick poll was designed to go in my wikispace. I realized that some respondents might be shy about editing a wikispace but very comfortable entering data into a form. The power of the form is that it can be embedded in as many places as you want and the information is aggregated for review.
Monday, 15. March 2010
One of the principles I have wavered about over the years was the sanctity of my desk within the classroom. At the beginning of my career it sat front and centre. In time it moved to the back and finally it has been relegated to a corner. The size of the desk varies with allocation. This last move, I requested the smallest desk available. It is still a teacher’s desk. I remember the stony gazes I offered students who dared sit in my comfy chair. A confiscated item was to remain tucked away in the security of an inviolate drawer until I chose to return it. The well-worn zip-binder containing my teacher’s daybook was not to be touched. It is hard to untangle the impulses of privileged status, privacy and confidentiality. In a confined space like a classroom, people need some personal space and a recognition of ownership. In a contemporary classroom governed by flexibility personal space can be difficult to establish.
The impulse to protect the teacher’s space is eroded by pragmatic considerations. Sometimes I invite trespass when I ask a student to retrieve something from my desk; the classroom’s digital camera, a spare scissor or ruler. My Les Nessman-like artificial walls tend to be ignored by all at such moments. The desk and chair are not so much the teacher’s personal space as they are the classroom command centre. The increasing importance of the teacher’s desktop and its hardwired peripherals in the classroom routine shifts everyone’s perspective of ownership significantly.
Consider the picture above. My student obligingly re-enacted his movements (raising the flag on Iwa Jima as it were) so I could illustrate my point. He is shifting the learning center groups and resetting the clock on the ActivBoard flipchart displayed at the front of the room. His body is blocking the Tuner and DVD/VCR hooked into the black tower on the filing cabinet. He got there first. Across the room another boy is frowning at him. He wanted to do the same thing on the ActivBoard. It is hard to control a computer needed by all. Students sit in my chair chatting on Skype or viewing videos and flipchart pages. They take over the computer for classroom presentations. I think I am describing something familiar to you all. If so, then you may also be aware of a growing problem.
The teacher’s desktop has become the management tool for much of my instructional technology. It is also the administrative tool for the school. Students are tracked through the computer through SIRS. Outlook connects staff throughout the division and parents to the classroom teacher. My grades and assessments are compiled there. I am told in the next six months the phone system will be connected to this computer. There will be some issues. I think the teacher’s desktop is going to become the classroom desktop. It may mean a classroom account to replace the teacher’s account for daily operation. I should shift administration to a different computer. This transformation is part of the changes we see in the classroom now. The centre of gravity shifts. The teacher is not the primary around which the students orbit like satellites. We are building a different structure.
Saturday, 13. March 2010
School is vaguely about learning why things are the way they are and more about seeing how much you can remember. Too often do i ask “why is this?” only to get an answer along the lines of “you don’t need to know that for the test, just remember bullet points 1 and 2 and you will be just fine”.Society wants cogs, and it’s beating the scientists right out of us to get them. What would people think about an Einstein if he were born today? Would we put him on Ritalin because he’s just another trouble maker not agreeing with the curriculum? Would a Da vinci just be another hyperactive kid that needs to calm down? Education is a very important and necessary part of society, however, we are losing the value of our creativity and curiosity for the replacement of efficiency. In the end you are forced to adapt in order to be successful and for society to be successful. The Educational System is the cost of a clockwork society.
My son Daniel wrote this two years ago as he was finishing his last year in high school. He attended a small rural school with about 160 students. I was his teacher off and on since he was in grade seven and an ever-present fixture in the schools he attended since he was in kindergarten. For much of his schooling I was the principal. School was a struggle for Daniel and he now pays the price for his own disability to learn in the limited environments we offered him for twelve years. His teachers recognized his predilection for convergent and divergent thinking but I have to confess none of his teachers had more than an inkling that they were working with an articulate and thoughtful person. Nothing he wrote for school matched the organization demonstrated in his blog entries.
I did not know Daniel was writing a blog in grade twelve. His teachers did not know he was writing a blog. I desperately wish I could find one comment left by a teacher. Perhaps it might not have made a difference to the academic outcome but then perhaps it would have. It is sad that he had to meet a teacher playing World of Warcraft to hear the phrase, “You are wise.”
Are we making progress? I hope so. I recently posted pictures showing how we can adapt our classrooms to the real needs of students. Rather than resort to drugs, I let students stand now. We give them cushions to sit on and rubber bands to push their feet against as they sit. One student can wear a weighted vest. It all helps.
Are we making enough progress? I don’t think so. Differentiating learning matters and we have known this for a hundred or more years. Every impulse to move in that direction is met by the systemic ethos of normative evaluation and its unwitting tool standardized assessment. Learning remains a distorted product of necessary economies of scale, our Education Acts, and core curriculum. Some of us hope instructional technologies will help shift the prevalent paradigm of education. I am less sanguine.
At twenty-one, Daniel blogs less than he used to. I learned about his blog some time ago when he shyly mentioned it. He is kind to me in his occasional references and I am grateful for that but I remain at some level just another teacher who triaged him in school as needing help, but not quite nearly enough for the available resources. I’m lucky there are other levels to our relationship.
I easily lose track of the number of years I have been in this community of purpose. Thirty soon; so easy to become jaded by what you do. I’m grateful that the passion has been increasing thanks to my connections with this wider community and always the young people who come into my life.
Thursday, 11. March 2010
Find more videos like this on Crossroads
I think we are unnecessarily anxious about technological integration in learning. It is happening. I was in a meeting this week puzzling out how to move my school division colleagues forward toward integrating a variety of technologies into our classrooms. We were all educators so our arsenal of strategies is pretty good. At times, the discussion reminds me of a personal struggle: physical fitness. That struggle informs my attitude toward integrating unfamiliar technologies. You know fitness is good for you but you don’t think you have the time to focus on the problem. If I started training I know I would feel better and it would gradually become easier. How does a gym teacher invite a reluctant student into physical activity? I imagine the response to that would be varied. Some approaches would be direct and others indirect. Force the poor kid to run laps or include her in a game? The goal in either case is to embed physical activity into the life of the child. I reflect our common bias. If you are reading my reflections then you likely feel a little technological integration would be healthy in the classroom.
Like learning, technological integration is not something we have to do, it is something we need to let happen. We are discussing the height of the dike and wondering how much water we can handle as the unstoppable waters rise. We will have some opportunity to influence the flow and some sound advice about how each individual might maneuver in the turbulence, but we will not stop the flood. The young people are not going to stop surfing simply because we tell them it is dangerous either. The ocean cannot be ignored. It will find a way around or over us.
Learning and creativity will find a way around or over us. We are working on Heritage Fair projects in the grade four and five class. Yesterday one of my students asked me if I thought it would be be acceptable for him to present a slide show using his Nintendo DSI. “I think the ‘I’ stands for image,” he offers tentatively. He has the DSI, it made sense to use it. I have to applaud his effort to add value to an expensive toy. He is by no means the only student integrating technology in his learning.
In the course of the last two days students initiated evening Skype calls to my home laptop. One was a girl in my class who decided she should add me to her contacts. She connects with friends and it must have seemed natural to add me. The other was more interesting. This was a girl from South Carolina. Her class has been talking to my class and I guess she had the same impulse as my own student. The young people see the practicality of this all and they will do it. I’m not worried about technological integration.
Tuesday, 9. March 2010
Do you remember the last time you hovered at the back of a conference hall because you were at your limit sitting through the day? I am embarrassed about the number of years (decades) I spent telling my students to stop wandering around the classroom, stop perching and fidgeting, and sit quietly in their seats. This year I finally recognized how unsuitable classroom furniture can be. We are exploring alternative seating and offering a range of micro-environments for students. Attention to ergonomics and young people’s sensory needs are making a big difference in my classroom this year.
Sunday, 7. March 2010
It’s been a great 10 days in Australia, one that’s been too packed for much blogging, obviously, and one that was highlighted yesterday by a visit to one of those “I really wish my kids went to school there” type of schools in a Melbourne suburb. It’s hard to capture everything that’s cool about the Wooranna Park Primary School in a blog post, but let me boil it down to this: the kids are driving the learning, from the design of the school and the curriculum to the decision making around school policy and more. It’s one of those inquiry-based learning environments where the moment you step into it you just feel something different. Different spaces. Different colors. Different conversations. Different stuff up on the walls. … learning is not a linear exercise, it’s random, it’s self-directed, it looks like spaghetti. And at Wooranna, it’s very, very obvious.
I mentioned in a previous blog that we might associate learning contracts with students owning their own learning. Here there is a reference to inquiry-based environments. I think this is another key practice. I love the final phrases.
Sunday, 7. March 2010
I found this at John Pederson’s blog, ijohnpederson but I found Dunlap’s reminiscence more to the point. I think it comes closer to what I think people mean by students owning learning. He seems to be describing what was referred to as Free Schools in my Madison, Wisconsin childhood of that same time. Teachers encouraged the students to design their own curriculum. Teachers then mentored the students through their individual program plans. Like Dunlap, I think these memories have influenced my conception of owning learning.
Darius Dunlap Says:
September 15th, 2007 at 11:20 am
When I was in Fourth Grade, my family moved and I found myself in a new school in a new part of the country. I’m sure this effected me in many subtle ways, but at school it was all about the different teaching approach.The school was an “experimental school” (well, for 1972) that taught using a self-paced method. I was there just for fourth and fifth grade, but this counts as probably the one learning experience that sticks with me to this day.
David Warlick references owning learning in a blog entry when he speaks of transferring responsibility for learning to the student.
One of the ideas that Clarence [Fisher] shared that resonated with me was about how he has his own students do their quarterly reading evaluations. This is important, because to switches the responsibility to the student. Their learning contract becomes an arrangement with themselves, rather than a responsibility to the teacher. They are owning their learning, when they work on their own terms.
Learning contracts are a common vehicle for transferring responsibility to the learner. The learning contract defines what is to be learned and also the basis for assessment. I am quite familiar with learning contracts from my own practice. They energize learning and foster exactly the responsibility we are seeking in our students. This differs from Dunlap’s brief description though. Perhaps I read this into the learning contract, but I expect the benchmarks for success and curriculum content largely remain controlled by the teacher. Students take ownership for the means of learning and as the word contract implies, there is a mutual agreement about the mode of assessment. Dean Shareski alludes to this in his comment to my last post.
Own You: to win repeatedly against an opponent. When something (general a band) is the best – to the point where you are not worthy.
Own It: Taking pride in what you’ve got.
Own It: When you walk into a bathroom after someone has just taken a terrible shit and it smells completely disgusting. You now “Own it”. That smell belongs to you even though you didn’t produce it. If someone sees you leaving the bathroom they are going to assume you did it. It’s not even worth explaining, just except the fact that it now belongs to you. Urban Dictionary
Owning learning struck me as a bit of contemporary jargon. Not in itself pejorative, its slang nature sent me to the Urban Dictionary. I invite Canadians to see what it has to say about the recent “own the podium” phrase. “I own you” is a familiar phrase still; it does not connect with what we are thinking when we say owning learning. I turned to own it. Taking pride in what you have appeals to me. Taking pride in learning. The definition informs us about the attitude a student might take when they are in control of their own learning. I think the concept of student ownership goes beyond young people taking pride in their learning. The concept rests on Fisher’s point that students own their learning when they work on their own terms.
My eyes widened when I read the final definition. The exposition of a young person implicated in the bad smell produced by someone else. Responsibility for someone else’s undertaking has been thrust upon an innocent. Are the students herded into our classrooms at the bell and offered the opportunity to negotiate a contract to master our predetermined student learning outcomes? How comfortable are we with our curriculum and these assessments for and of learning that students cannot seem to avoid. Is there room for genuine student ownership of learning? Will this learning really be on their terms or are we asking them to own our shit?
Saturday, 6. March 2010
Perhaps we need to reiterate people reach mastery in different ways. Most of my grade four and fives approach creative writing by ‘remixing’ familiar stories from their lives: books, movies, and always TV shows. The characters tend to be their friends. A few draw on familiar literary narrative archetypes to tell unique stories with imaginary characters.
I think most young writers are hesitant to work without a scaffold such as a familiar tale. Their perception of ownership lies in their ability to give the template their own flavour and also lies in the success they feel in matching the model. We were studying the skeletal system this month. I planned to dump some materials on my students and ask them to design their own models. I backed away from this and we built a model of the spine together. The results pleased them quite a bit. If one of them had formulated their own model design, or if some of the writers had presented alternative plans to my suggested writing, I would have encouraged them to try.
I wonder what we are prepared to accept when we speak of ownership. When we set a student learning outcome for our students, write it on the white board, clarify goals, and set them to it; what is our response when a student suggests they don’t want to do the math at all. Do we explore alternative learning outcomes or do we exert authority, influence or power to redirect the young person back to our selected outcome? Nobody seems to want to engage me in a discussion of what student “ownership” means to them. If it simply means engagement with the goal of mastering curriculum outcomes, then I think the word ownership is misleading.
Thursday, 4. March 2010
Technology (even pencils) are never neutral. They have layers of social and cultural meaning. Each tool becomes not simply a means of creating, but a means of socialization and potentially indoctrinating. If I have students follow a format, a program of binders, for example, I have imposed my own layer of social engineering
John Spencer’s recent blog reflects on way our choice of classroom technology implicates us in social engineering. As I remarked on Twitter recently, every habit calls for critical reflection. Spencer is correct. Our decisions to adopt curriculum materials, learning strategies and technology are affected by social agendas and in turn influence the learning of young people. He offers the example of assimilating immigrants as an example. Canadian educators are ever conscious of this as we tap the far greater resources available across our border. When I visit a web site with my students or distribute a learning package I weigh the material’s value against its American perspective. It is a pressing problem in a classroom where my ten-year-olds are prone to ask who Canada’s president is.
Public education is social engineering. If this were not done formally it would proceed informally. Spencer’s blog second guesses his decision to accept technology into his classroom because he suspects the motives of the source of this largess. It is a valid concern, but we need to remember that social engineering experiments do not always have the intended consequences. History is full of examples where the cultural artifacts of one culture were adapted by a second for its own ends. The first nations peoples of Canada adapted western technology for their own ends. We tend to think their story ended with Wounded Knee or the Battle of Batoch, but it is an ongoing story of cultural adaptation and recovery here in Canada. Their ends will be met with our tools. Along with assimilation there is acculturation and accommodation. I’m confident that in Spencer’s hands, the corporate agenda represented by the free technology will be adapted to the real needs of his young people.
Wednesday, 3. March 2010
I spend some time in schools now. I see many teachers doing remarkable things and young people responding as they have always done to genuineness, warmth and empathy. Our learners constantly surprise us.But I also find a temerity amongst teachers, a fear of risk. I sometimes find fear of accountability – the stress of Provincial Achievement Tests. I often find a sense of despair that they cant do all that is expected of them by the Provincial curriculum – not quite the bible, but certainly regarded by many as the handbook to the holy land. Some cherish their professionalism, but many feel that it has been lost – certainly in the eyes of the community.
I wrote some time ago that it is time to give schools back to teachers – to trust them again and to give them room in the curriculum at all levels to invent, create, inspire, challenge and take risks with ideas. It is also time to rethink accountability and to focus on the teachers accountability for the work of each student in real time. It is time for real learning. It is time to recognize that, as far as learning outcomes are concerned, less is more. Less curriculum demands and more learning; less standardized testing and more person to person accountability; less fear and more inspiration.
We know what is fundamental. We understand the essence of teaching. Stephan Muratroyd’s reminiscence and reflection is wonderful. It triggered significant memories and reinforced my instincts about what really constitutes teaching. We are industriously fine tuning assessment; many of us dazzled by its cleverness and overwhelming authority. Personal judgement and doubt are suppressed by the imperatives of universal student learning outcomes and standardized assessments that measure individual progress against the all too familiar normative curve. Our administrations urge us to be professional yet this whole shift in emphasis simply de-professionalizes us and encourages our inner statistician. Don’t compare siblings or classmates we urge; assessment do nothing but. It is discouraging. Murgatroyd’s reflection let me touch base with where my strength comes from. You need to read it.
