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.
Posted via web from edustange’s posterous
Posted in public education by Alan Stange -
Monday, 5. October 2009
Reading in the library
I thought I had a bad day and then I remembered of how my day began and how it ended. The day began when I reluctantly shifted out of my comfortable living room chair intensely conscious that I had only had only consumed a third of my ritual morning coffee fix. Fifteen minutes later it was 7:30 and I was greeting the first members of my volleyball team. For an hour and a bit they trusted me to teach them how to be better players. Nine seventh and eighth grade girls giving over precious adolescent sleep time.
I allowed a few frustrations to rattle me at the pool a short while later when my home room went for their swimming lessons. Delays for forgotten swimming suites and the frustration of missing clothes; its a bit difficult maintaining perspective when you are focussed on a schedule and a bewildered student looking for his pants. Those moments temporarily eclipsed the experience of watching them swim, dive and water slide (well that was recess for them). I was reminded of it all when I was transferring some pictures from my camera to the desktop.
Today was my students’ day in the computer lab. The SLO (student learning outcome) was demonstrating that they could initiate discussion threads on their wikispaces. When they return, we will follow up with replies. Thanks to the delay at the pool, this was all we were able to get through in the morning. My reading period went missing. A student hung back at the beginning of lunch to ask if I could help her brother start a wikipage. He hovered at the door until I invited him in to establish an account and activate the boy’s division email account. His eyes widened slightly with interest when I told him the account was his until he left school. The pair left hurriedly to eat their lunch. The younger sister will mentor her brother for a while and then I imagine he will quickly take ownership. In passing I noticed three students are trying to build their digital portfolios before I am ready. Three students have YouTube accounts now. This started when one wanted to create and upload his own video. His first efforts are embedded on his page now. The three students subscribe to each other’s accounts.
We spent an hour with a First Nations storyteller right after lunch. I was struck by my student’s eagerness to volunteer for the roll plays generated by the stories. A number of boys unselfconsciously acted out the roles from where they sat watching: irrepressible engagement, “Can we stand so we can see better?” Recess was late so all I managed was a brief writing activity before I turned them over to a colleague. He helped me begin the math pre-assessment that slipped my notice throughout September. His time on this was brief. The students ended their day in the library exchanging books. I caught up with them there in order to capture some portraits we will use in a Thanksgiving art project. I had a SST (student support) meeting at the end of the day so I almost missed the departure of my students. A few of them were distracted by their cross country match after school. They were wrapping that activity up when I left a little after 5:00.
I stressed the missed academic classes today. Reading, writing and math benchmarks preoccupy me these days. I marked a spelling assessment as the students swam this morning. The regular classes are feeling fragmented at the moment. Continuity in Social Studies, writing and science is strained for the next few weeks. It is hard to let such things drop.
The beaming person in the picture attached usually smiles. Its hard not to think he had a good day. Volleyball, swimming classes, social networking, a Cree storyteller, library and a cross-country run, the Student learning outcomes are not always clear and there will be no end of year assessment. Well perhaps there will, when the students look back on what they learned and what they did. It is really a very prosaic sort of day in an elementary school I think.
Posted in Classroom technology, Social Networking, public education, student assessment by Alan Stange -
Saturday, 5. September 2009
BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Maths ‘no better than in 1970s’.
Researchers asked 3,000 11 to 14-year- olds in England to sit maths exams taken by pupils in 1976, and compared their scores with the earlier results.
Analysis suggested there was little difference between the two generations.
But among pupils from the previous generation taking O-level maths, less than a quarter gained a C or above, compared to 55% in GCSEs last year.Dr Jeremy Hodgen, of King’s College, London, who led the research team, suggested the disparity between unchanged ability and the increase in grades was partly down to schools’ obsession with Sats results and league table positions.
He said: “There’s a great deal of teaching to the test, so that in trying to increase scores, schools develop an understandable focus on the test, so there’s a narrowing of the curriculum.”
He also said mainstream schools today had a higher proportion of lower-achieving pupils, whereas in the 1970s many of these pupils would have been in special schools.
The dreaded inflation of marks. I recall my initial confusion as a fifteen year old moving from Wisconsin to Saskatchewan. The grading structure was quite different.
Madison 1972 Regina 1972
A 90 A 80
B 80 B 70
C 70 C 60
D 60 D 50
I may have the Wisconsin grades too low by 3-5%. I have lost my records from that period. It took me until my fourth year in university to understand grading rules are arbitrary and results are easily manipulated. One professor hammered away at the importance of reliable test items. She meant designing items a specific percentage of students could answer correctly. What, apparently, would be the advantage in designing a test with a 100% success rate?
When I began my teaching career in Nigeria I despaired because my O-level candidates experienced something like a 30% pass rate. I have watched the numbers all my career and now stressed over the design and results of each test. I have never returned a test or submitted a final mark completely comfortable with the accuracy of my assessment. I think most teachers would share this experience.
I listen politely when we are discussing mandated standardized provincial assessment for learning. I’ve never failed to gain another exemplar for my assessment repertoire. I earnestly embrace the goals and conscientiously apply the strategies. I encourage the children and stress their results. It is the same old dance and everyone enthusiastically embracing the activity or stressing the results should realize that.
The more you invest in something, the greater its value in your mind. The results do not represent an absolute and they strategies may not stand the test of time. If my observations do not strike you as truisms, then I am a little concerned.
Posted in public education, student assessment by Alan Stange -
