Edustange

In Prairie South School Division Westmount School’s Kathy Cassidy was selected as one of Canada’s most tech-savvy teachers. I’m impressed with the technology she has introduced in her classroom. She is leading in a direction I want to follow. I was reflecting on the absence of DVD or VHS use in the video. There were no shots of books or traditional seat work either. It is there in the classroom I am sure and I understand why it is not in this short video. The video highlights new instructional technologies. In 2010 viewers would wonder why a video would highlight decades old technology like video recordings. They have been more or less successfully integrated into North American classrooms. I hope we are working for the day when Skyping with a guest, receiving an aunt’s response to a blog, and compiling data from around the world on a wiki are as prosaic and unremarkable as slapping a DVD into a machine and watching Bill Nye the Science Guy.

The Asking of New Questions at Classroots.org.

We can’t go back to the days of closed classroom doors and scatter ourselves to the wind on eccentric pedagogical whims.  However, we can leverage our strengths to create and scale-up classrooms with new approaches to teaching and learning that are authentic to students and politically viable to our leaders.  We can radically differentiate what we do to help students and ourselves, and then regroup in teams, schools, and divisions organized on principles more authentic, lasting, and human than standardized-test results.  Let’s get to the future and ask ourselves how we will organize education when everyone meets every standard.  And if we don’t think that’s possible, again, let’s do something different now to make our students the innovators, entreprenuers, and citizens we all want them to be.

I read Chad Sansing’s remarks with interest tonight as I sat catching up with the day’s communication while supper’s rich aroma filled the air.  I’ve used the well-worn phrase industrial education a few times over the last few entries. Some of his remarks on diversity and differentiation caught my attention.

There are within my region public, separate, independent schools and a sprinkling of home schooled students. Within my school division we have a few schools on a four-day instructional week and within the city, an alternate program. These two programs seem constantly in a defensive stance in regard to the rest of the program design. Some years ago this division introduced the Copernican Plan in one of the city high schools. This has fallen by the way. Organizational structures trend toward uniformity. Something loves consistency and organizational interdependence adopts common days (one to five).

Evaluation is personal because we view results as shorthand for those who produced them. Consider how often we place students by their grades and test scores; consider how we talk about students because of their grades and test scores and placements.

What if we placed students by interest? By learning style? By mastery of content?

What if we restructured schools to do the same for adults? What if a school system reorganized to better manage its human capital by creating different types of schools where its teachers and students could find success? Why keep putting square peg teachers into round hole classrooms?

Why is our rhetoric all innovation and our funding all conformity? When do we ask radically new questions of the system to help us do the job it says it wants us to do?

I think we do need breath deep and let differentiated learning take us where it will.

Open Classroom Schools.

Open education is a philosophy which values the natural development and experience of the child as the primary determinants for the appropriate curriculum and methods…. The open classroom school generally had an architectural configuration of large pods containing six to twelve classrooms, each with an outside access and no interior walls.

Without traditional rooms, teachers could redefine the nature of their role. The teacher shifted from the dispenser of knowledge to the facilitator of learning. Teachers were no longer isolated from each other. They were better able to confer and plan. Learning became an activity that was child centered rather than teacher-oriented. Standard grade-level skill checklists were set aside and the differences in individual needs provided the rationale for the curricula. Students’ progress was not based on rankings, which define success in a competitive context; instead, evaluation of progress was reported in terms of the individual’s achievement in relation to growth from previous levels and the individual’s initiative and responsibility as demonstrated in academic and related arts areas.

Read more: http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2302/Open-Classroom-Schools.html#ixzz0TewSK1VL

In 1975, in my senior year my inter-city high school choir travelled from Regina to Seattle for a tour. It was memorable, but you don’t really want to hear about the parties or the impromptu concerts we performed on the Greyhound bus. I came from a family of educators so I was tuned in some way to philosophies of education. I had two remarkable experiences. The first was watching high schools students at an inner city school demonstrating African dance and drumming. It was an unfamiliar ethnic exposure for a boy raised in middle class Wisconsin and Saskatchewan. I’m pleased to say it is a far more familiar experience for me today. The second was visiting an elementary school that practiced the open concept. It was a revelation to me and I embraced the idea. Understand I was eighteen, finishing high school and three years away from a commitment to teaching. It had a rightness. It seemed a breath of fresh air in the stuffiness of my twelve years of traditional schooling.

The memory comes back to me now like Marley’s ghost rattling chains of lost opportunities. For fifteen years I taught in a rural school with an average of one hundred and twenty students. I realize now I kept tentatively groping toward an open classroom during those years. Echoes of the movement came to me in curriculum development and inservice: learning centers, learning contracts, independent study plans utilizing a variety of spaces. I think the project kept me in that school long after I should have left. It almost worked in the small multigrade environment of that time and I am convinced it is the salvation and strength that can be given to our small rural schools today.

I am back in a multigrade classroom. In a real sense we are all in multigrade classrooms and we have been struggling to remember that. We have also been struggling to make differentiated learning a practicality. I had a moment this last week when I thought it might be possible. It was just a brief hour when my students moved independently and in small groups about their tasks largely mindful of the learning habits needed to make things work in our end of the school.

Students and teachers typically spend the first weeks of the year learning how to work effectively in this space. After they have learned how to minimize disruption to their fellow students, the real work of the school year begins. Rather than having one teacher lecture to the entire group at once, students are typically divided into different groups for each subject according to their skill level for that subject. The students then work in these small groups to achieve their assigned goal, often in a cooperative system. Teachers serve as both facilitators and instructors. Open Classroom

I saw this in Seattle. I think it was authentic and practical, not just an impressionable teen’s momentary experience. I often wonder how long it was sustained before they rebuilt the walls between the classrooms and herded the children back into their cohorts. The open classroom failed for practical reasons. Our current interest in differentiated learning also runs counter to the strong current of pragmatic, economical, industrial education models. Perhaps our success lies in understanding why Open Classrooms failed to become the standard over the last fifty years. It was not simply a matter of confusing physically open spaces. Perhaps there are still collaborative teams of educators making the Open Classroom work. I would enjoy hearing from them. I’m glad that winter day in Seattle is still with me.

View All Demotivators®.

You really have to smile at these demotivating aphorisms.