Tag Archives: schooling

21st century learning, Education

Imagine never being born again. Mike Wesch reminds us why we are teachers.

Leave a comment

Mike Wesch can easily collapse your constructed view of learning and teaching to clear a path for a clear vision of what’s essential.  Watch the video below.

Click on “The Syllabus” link below to see Mike’s trailer for his upcoming course. Dr Michael Wesch is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

The SyllabusI got so excited about my new syllabus that I decided to create a “trailer” for it. Here’s how I introduced it on the first day of class. For more information about how I created my new syllabus, check out http://myteachingnotebook.com/index.php/2015/08/28/rethinking-the-syllabus/

Posted by Michael Wesch on Friday, 28 August 2015

How can I sign up for Mike’s class!

As Mike Wesch says at the beginning of his video, “we create our tools and then our tools create us.”

In a way the curriculum is a tool. It’s a carefully constructed document, a program, a set of criteria and outcomes designed to capture what we want our students to learn and how we should teach this.

The intention is good but what about the outcome? As a tool that is meant to guide us and ensure that we address all the aspects of our subject areas, has it in fact shaped us, and what does this mean?

Are we slaves to a once living conversation and collaborative debate about learning and teaching that educators felt passionate about – now a dry document with boxes to tick and outcomes to begrudgingly limit our teaching to?

Are we imprisoned in a cocoon which prevents us from evolving to our natural and more colourful role as teachers who directly pass on passion and excitement to students, freed from predetermined outcomes which prevent each student to follow his/her learning path as if it were the first time anyone had experienced this journey?

Does our curriculum leave us, as educators, with our hands tied, and thus prevented from being who we could be for students – experts and learners ourselves who can inspire our young people to be fully involved in their own learning journey?

Weren’t we once totally besotted with our subject areas, passionate about learning within our chosen fields?

Do we even have the time and head space to keep  learning, that is, to keep the flame burning in ourselves?

Think about it: how has the curriculum, as a tool, created us as educators? How has it shaped our behaviours in the classroom and affected the way we teach?

What has become of schooling?

School, like college, should really be about ‘learning all kinds of stuff so that the world comes alive’. Let’s keep that at the forefront of the way we teach kids.

Connected Courses

How many years does it take to change a light bulb? What about schooling?

3 Comments

Alec Couros shared this video. It’s a clever advertisement about lighting. Main message:

Our homes have changed radically over the past century. So why do we still use lighting that’s based on 19th century technology? Well, that’s all about to change.

Isn’t this an apt metaphor for education, specifically schooling? I really think so. So many aspects of life have changed  but the way we view learning and teaching in most schools and many tertiary institutions has changed very little since the Industrial Age.

I know that some educators reading this post will disagree, even be offended. It’s not that we don’t have expert, committed teachers. It’s not that students learn nothing; of course they do.  It’s just that the internet has opened up access to information, and the new opportunities to connect to information and people, the ability to create something online, to collaborate, to ask questions, to learn outside the classroom/course, to follow your passion, to drive the learning, to make a difference – all these things have changed the game. We can teach content well, we can also teach specific skills, but what are we doing to teach students how to learn what they will need when they leave school – because that is unknown to all of us. Learning how to learn – we’ve heard it all before, but what does it mean? If teachers were forced to be learners in an unknown learning environment, would it make any difference to their perception of their role?  When we’re used to teaching what we know and have known for years, are we out of touch with what it’s like to be bewildered learners?

We don’t know what our students will need to know throughout their working lives but we should recognise that the learning will be continual, and they won’t be in cosy classrooms with dedicated teachers. The curriculum is unknown. The only thing we know for certain is that being able to navigate the learning journey is imperative.  Will our students feel lost or will they know how to find the people they need to help them? Will they know what questions to ask, and will they feel comfortable developing their learning networks, or will they feel they have failed because they are not used to initiating their own learning journey?

There isn’t a simple solution to this but there is the possibility of changing the game.  Right now I’m enjoying the personal interactions in Connected Courses. I’m learning so much from other people through conversations, sharing of information and projects, of digital tools and research methods. Many blogging their way through this course have said what I’m about to say. Much of the learning is not explicitly related to a task. The incidental learning is getting me going – motivated, that is, to go in for more. Yes, there’s a structure, recommended readings, topics and videos to watch, but there is a choice of what, how much and when we do something. There’s company – that’s the best part. There are platforms like Twitter (#ccourses), Google+ (#ccourses), Facebook and others, where we can go. So as soon as we read something, as soon as we watch a webinar (in real-time or archived), in which we meet the facilitating people – and these people are contactable through social media – we have the opportunity to jump into one of the many platforms and say what we think, ask questions, benefit from other viewpoints, gather further information from our network, initiate or join projects or create things (eg #dailyconnect).

Why can’t learning be like this for our students? Why don’t all teachers enjoy a professional community like this one?

(Why can’t I stop asking rhetorical questions?)

I’d like to finish with a slab of transcript text from Anant Agarwal’s TED talk: Why massive open online courses (still) matter. (Thanks to Yin Wah Kreher’s post).

Here he is talking about peer learning.

Let me tell you a story. When we did our circuits course for the 155,000 students, I didn’t sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course. I told my TAs, okay, 24/7, we’re going to be up monitoring the forum, answering questions. They had answered questions for 100 students. How do you do that for 150,000? So one night I’m sitting up there, at 2 a.m. at night, and I think there’s this question from a student from Pakistan, and he asked a question, and I said, okay, let me go and type up an answer, I don’t type all that fast, and I begin typing up the answer, and before I can finish, another student from Egypt popped in with an answer, not quite right, so I’m fixing the answer, and before I can finish, a student from the U.S. had popped in with a different answer. And then I sat back, fascinated. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were discussing and interacting with each other, and by 4 a.m. that night, I’m totally fascinated, having this epiphany, and by 4 a.m. in the morning, they had discovered the right answer. And all I had to do was go and bless it, “Good answer.” So this is absolutely amazing, where students are learning from each other, and they’re telling us that they are learning by teaching.

Students learn really well with a great teacher and a finely tuned class but they can also take a more active part, and the collective whole can become better than the one-to-many model.

 

 

Education

Are schooling and learning synonymous?

58 Comments

I’m adding a post about a post added by Will Richardson who added a post after he read a tweet by Alec Couros.

Yeah.

Will starts out like this:

Yesterday, Alec Couros went “Back to School” to “Meet the Teacher” of his first grade daughter. Here is what he saw:

Photo by Alec Couros (from Weblogg-ed)

Both Will and Alec have children in school or about to start and feel pretty much the same way about schools which seem so traditional that they have been left behind in the Industrial Age (my interpretation).

Will’s post nails the problem for some parents (are most of these teachers themselves?) when school isn’t the ideal place to educate their kids. What do you do then?

Will has captured the Twitter responses to Alec’s initial tweets and they are definitely an interesting read.

I agree with you, Will – this tweet expresses my own view of my sons’ schooling:

“We’ve always considered public school ed our kids receive as supplemental to the ed we provide at home so we don’t go crazy about it.”

I’m writing from the perspective of a parent who has been though a few hells and come back to review school education many times. My boys are now in second year uni and year 10. I’ve never expected school to be responsible for all the learning or to contain the most important learning for my boys. Or did I understand that gradually? Did I expect more and come to accept less? Yes, I think so.

I am not about to criticise all schools, all teachers. I’m a teacher and far from perfect. I would not like to be a principal. So when I say that schools have been less than what they could have been, I just think that the talent and dedication which many educators display every day could be better directed with an informed view of the kind of learning which truly prepares our kids for living and working in their world. We are not preparing our kids adequately for their future because we are not projecting our goals into their future – we are clinging to our old perception of what we need to teach them.

A few things that spring to mind throughout the years my boys were at school:

  • My older (tested as highly gifted at the age of 5 – not because I wanted to bask in this, but because I wanted to cater for his needs and understand him) came into mainstream Grade 2 from Montessori. When he was given a list of spelling words to learn which he’d known since the age of 3, and I discussed this with his teacher, his teacher said, ‘We can’t have Sasha doing his own work and the rest of the class doing their work…’  My question at the time: Why not? which I didn’t voice because I still respected that the teacher knew best and the parent should comply.
  • When I asked subsequent teachers for support in keeping my son interested at school, they either

1) gave him extra work which he didn’t want to do, and then told me he wasn’t cooperating

2) devoted all further discussions to pointing out that he wasn’t like other children, and that he should concentrate on fitting in

3) placed all importance on social skills (his apparent failure to be like everyone else) and ignored the academic aspect. (Let me say that pointing out to a child that he is different and that this difference is somehow a handicap, is not going to help his social skills. Telling him to dumb down, as the school psychologist did, is also not going to help)

I just want to say that I also have many excellent memories balancing out these not so positive ones, and these centre on wonderful teachers. I’m not painting an entirely black picture but still, if I had to estimate how much of school I thought was truly valuable, I would have to say that there is so much I would have done without, so much I would have done differently, so much wasted time. But it’s worse than wasted time, it’s the turning away from a natural love of learning. Sometimes I think that my children, my students, are successful despite their schooling, not because of it.

My younger son absolutely lives for music and wants to be a comp0ser. He is happy this year in his new school, The Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School, in year 10, where he follows the same academic curriculum as in other schools but also benefits from expert tuition and performance experience in music.

How do I remember most of his schooling before this? Apart from his two final years in primary school when he had fantastic teachers who did wonders for his love of learning and self esteem, the first 3 years of secondary school were times where he had to put away his burning desire to compose and play music because he spent almost every waking moment completing homework tasks. Granted, some students would have either done the same more quickly or not been as conscientious, but the hardest part was seeing him develop an aversion to learning and a low opinion of himself as a learner. That’s difficult for a parent.

In retrospect, I would perhaps do some things differently. I like the way Will and his wife communicate with the teachers:

We write an e-mail (or a letter) to each teacher introducing our kids and ourselves, letting them know what our hopes are, what we’d love to see our kids doing, and what we’ll do to support the classroom. We also introduce ourselves, and talk a little bit about what our worldview of education looks like. Finally, we offer to continue that conversation and help make it a reality in the classroom in whatever way we can. And we cc the principal and headmaster (since Tess is in private school.)

I think you have to work hard to develop a positive relationship with teachers and principals. I gave up too easily in situations when a teacher responded in a defensive manner, particularly when it meant resenting my child. In this case I withdrew, fearing the repercussions for my child, but now I might hold my ground a little longer and try not to take the whole thing personally. The parent/teacher relationship can be delicate.

Certainly I have always taken a very active role in my children’s education, and I’m not referring to basic literacy and numeracy skills, but to opening up their minds to bigger picture questions, providing them with resources and activities within their interest areas.

I wonder how differently teachers would teach without the sometimes crippling restrictions of curriculum, if there was time to discuss what they thought was most important and without the looming university entrance scores.

Despite all this, I think that, if I had the chance to do this again, I would still not choose homeschooling – which is not to say that I think it doesn’t work. My husband and I always felt that being part of a school community was important for our sons, and finding your place was also important.

Katie Hellerman was also inspired to write a post after reading Will Richardson’s, and it’s a good read.

I would love to hear from you about the topic of schooling and learning. Do you think schooling prepares young people adequately, well? If not, how would you reconfigure schooling?

21st century learning, creativity, debate, Education, learning, teachers, teaching, Web 2.0

A balance between teaching skills and content

4 Comments

oldscales

Photo by takaken2008 on Flickr

What are 21st century skills and are these skills different to those currently being taught in schools?  How radically do we need to change our teaching practices?

Daniel Willingham has written an informative post in Britannica blog entitled Education for the 21st century: balancing content with skills, in which he asks and answers the important question: why the sudden concern for 21st century skills.

Willingham quotes reports and books  that point to:

changes in the skills required for most jobs. Our economy is generating fewer jobs in which workers engage in repetitive tasks throughout their day (e.g., assembly line work) and more information-rich jobs that present workers with novel problems and that require analysis and teamwork.

 Willingham quotes Elena Silva in defining these skills as having at their core the ability to

analyze and evaluate information, create new ideas and new knowledge from the information.

He also adds to creativity and critical thinking the following essential skills for the 21st century from a report from the partnership for 21st century skills :

new knowledge … [and] global awareness, media literacy, information literacy, and other new content.

Now, this is where I start sitting up and taking note. Although I’m fully on board with the need for 21st century skills, I haven’t felt comfortable substituting content for skills alone. Memorisation of facts without the skills is obviously a waste of time, and I understand that you need the skills to locate, manage and synthesize the freely available information to create knowledge, but we still need a knowledge of some content, surely, otherwise the skills are free floating and without context. 

Willingham ties up the skills/content dilemma very well for me. He says that the 21st century skills require deep understanding of subject matter:

Shallow understanding requires knowing some facts. Deep understanding requires knowing the facts AND knowing how they fit together, seeing the whole.

And skills like “analysis” and “critical thinking” are tied to content; you analyze history differently than you analyze literature … If you don’t think that most of our students are gaining very deep knowledge of core subjects—and you shouldn’t—then there is not much point in calling for more emphasis on analysis and critical thinking unless you take the content problem seriously. You can’t have one without the other.

As usual, a balance is required to make things work effectively, and this should surely be common sense. This way we avoid the too often pendulum swings that have occurred in the history of education

between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) which fosters concern that students lack knowledge and generates a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content, which fosters concern that student are merely parroting facts with no idea of how to use their knowledge, and so on.

For me, this balance is the key to identifying the problems and solutions of 21st century learning. I’m trying to understand the shift in education more deeply to avoid a superficial conversion. I think that, for me at least, more discussion will enable a deeper understanding of the learning processes and the corresponding teaching processes that are essential to prepare students for work and life in these times.

As usual, I welcome and am grateful for any comments, and look forward to generating some discussion.