For a number of years I have used The Candy Cultures Activity, first as a multiculturalism activity, then as a leadership activity. I had a chance to experience it on two other levels recently. First, I ran the activity at our Pro-D with staff a week ago. I also shared it with the Student Leadership Council (SLC) Executive and, this week, they ran the activity at their first meeting with about 60 students participating.

In the activity members of a specific culture greet and chat with members of other cultures. One culture consists of ‘close talkers’ who like to make physical contact when talking, others like their personal space. Some cultures feel subservient and/or superior to other cultures. Participants mingle and a funny social ‘dance’ begins.

With the staff: After running this activity with students for so many years it was wonderful to run it with adults. I was impressed with the involvement of my peers, they really engaged in the activity. What I enjoyed most was listening to the meta-analysis of the activity during the debrief. I didn’t have to lead the conversation anywhere, it simply flowed from why we did it as a staff, to why to do the activity with students, to how it relates to our school beliefs…etc. I ended the debrief talking about how sometimes in a meeting we might all have the schools’ best interest in mind, but yet because of a defensive tone, or because of someone taking a different approach, we end up seeing each other in adversarial roles. We misinterpret ‘delivery’ with ‘intent’. I then pointed out that in 9 years at the school this is the first time we have almost all of the staff back. We know each other, and don’t need to do the ‘cultural dance’ we do with new people, so we really have the potential to have a great year.

With the SLC, (student leaders representing each Middle and High School in the district): I have never had the opportunity to casually observe this activity without being involved in some way. The approach taken was very good, and what I really liked was the debrief questions they came up with.

• 1. Describe your frustrations/challenges.
• 2. How do you improve communication?
• 3. Relate the experience to school.

Question one is about the experience students went through. Question two asks students to look inward and improve their own experience. Question three asks students to look outward at their school experience. The discussion went very well and it was great to see students pulling this off so eloquently with their peers.

This one is on Servant Leadership – providing students with capacities and competencies…

“Through their programs schools can provide the opportunity for the development of capacities and competencies, that enable young people to get started on the path of acting with a sense of civic responsibility. Through programs of community and “service” learning, student leadership programs, peer mediation and coaching, mentoring programs, and student decision-making groups, schools can provide the opportunity to students to develop a sense of commitment to others and a sense of service to further the interests of all groups in society.”
Page 431 Quote from International Handbook on Lifelong Learning, Chapman & D. Aspin , Edited by David N Aspin, Judith Chapman, Michael Hatton, Yukiko Sawano, (2001) Hingham, MA: Kluwer Academic

(I look at Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Robert K. Greenleaf starting on pg. 15 of My Master’s Paper. Here are some Student Leadership Lessons, and some wonderful Teaching Metaphors.)

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Peter Senge writes on Creative Tension and moving from Reality to Vision.

Leadership in a learning organization starts with the principle of creative tension. Creative tension comes from seeing clearly where we want to be, our “vision,” and telling the truth about where we are, our “current reality.” The gap between the two generates a natural tension. Creative tension can be resolved in two basic ways: by raising current reality toward the vision, or by lowering the vision toward current reality. Individuals, groups, and organizations who learn how to work with creative tension learn how to use the energy it generates to move reality more reliably toward their visions.
Peter M. Senge, The Leader’s New Work: Building Learning Organizations, Sloan Review, Fall 1990. p. 9.

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Michael Fullan on Knowledge Sharing – we have a ways to go in Education.

It is ironic that schools systems are late to the game of knowledge building both for their students and for their teachers. Most schools are not good at knowledge sharing within their own walls…”
M. Fullan (2001), Leading in a Culture of Change.San Francisco John Wiley & Sons. (p. 104).

A great article: Competing Paradigms and Educational Reform that asks,

What has this dominant paradigm actually done for public education except manufacture a crisis?

Not only does it list initiatives and consequences of this paradigm (read the post!), it also suggests a paradigm shift with the following perspective:

• Human freedom and empowerment are more critical than accountability and punishment.
• Life is about relationships, not acquisition.
• School is a democratic experience.
• Caring and trust for each person is the center of any truly professional activity.
• Schools are to improve society as a whole, not providing competitive advantage to the elite.
• Curriculum is best derived from the needs and interests of the learners.
• Developmental appropriateness should supersede national assessment.
• School failure is the result of a variety of political and economic causes.

“Supporters of this alternate perspective maintain that education is a process based on trust, not doubt and suspicion (Bryk & Schneider 2002). The crucial elements that will sustain school improvement is not high-stakes testing, standards, or reactionary accountability programs – “it is simple human trust… that rests on four supports: respect, competency, integrity, and personal regard for others” (George 2006).

“Real education is built on meaningful relationships. We do not learn things in isolation from each other. The core components of education are based on learner-centered values, a respect for diversity and complexity, tolerance, and empowerment. The developmental needs for learners are widespread and cannot be easily or meaningfully reduced to a pencil-based exam.”

This fits so well with where my thinking has been of late. To add to Christopher’s idea that the shift will come from the grassroots/bottom up, I am reminded of Dave Sands comment that, “Students will change education.”

From the introduction of:
The Teaching Moment:a learning metaphor by Mia Lobel, Michael Neubauer, Randy Swedburg

The Internet is saturated with distance education claims about learning environments, effective pedagogies, teaching modules, skill training techniques and community building models. Typing into Google: “online teaching training distance education” nets one 265,000 hits. Typically, efforts to deliver educational content and to construct knowledge online seem to be asynchronous. The synchronous teaching ‘engagements’, either attempt to incorporate high tech features like sound and/or video into their delivery method, while others seem to use Java based synchronous chat modules which only allow interacting in simple ASCII text. In general, one presumes that at least some portion of the teaching effectiveness claimed by this vast community of practitioners is predicated on long-term preparation, research, and experience. However, what this preparation may involve, on what specific data the opinions are based, or what the actual teaching really looks like, remains largely unclear.

“The Stone Soup” is an Eastern European folk tale. At the end of the war, a group of bedraggled soldiers come upon a devastated village. The inhabitants, having hidden the little bit of food they still had left, watched as one soldier made a fire, another fetched water in a cauldron, while another removed an ordinary looking stone from his pouch and placed it into the boiling water. Having accomplished this task, the soldiers settled around their campsite and began talking enthusiastically about their anticipated meal. The first soldier said: “Yes, stone soup is my favorite, but once I had it with cabbage, and that was delicious!” Hearing this, the bravest of the villagers, approached the cauldron and threw in his cabbage. The second soldier said: ”Ah, yes, but when you add a bit of beef, well…” Next, it was the village butcher who added a piece of meat he has been hoarding to the soup. Eventually, everyone sat down together to partake of the best soup the villagers have ever had. Before they left, the soldiers gave the magic stone to the villagers, reminding them that the stone’s power is actually in their cooperation.

Like in the children’s folk tale “The Stone Soup,” there seems to be a famine of empirical information about how learning actually takes place in the synchronous distance education village. Everyone seems to agree that knowledge is being delivered and the practitioners have found the delivery methods that serve them. The content of the knowledge being delivered is largely known, and often, grounded in theory. What seems to be missing is twofold: what are participants saying and how are they saying it? How is the learning task accomplished, and how are the group’s dynamics facilitated to allow the learning to unfold? This paper is an attempt to make transparent the process of experientially constructing knowledge in a real-time eClassroom, which has been described in Lobel, Neubauer, & Swedburg (2002).

The following account may be viewed as offering that which is invited: namely, other practitioners with whom to dialogue, and share the ingredients involved in creating the content and process of facilitating online real-time learning. The particular ‘teaching moment’ offered here seems apt in several ways. It demonstrates how people with different points of view, sharing their perspectives, can and do create a common pool of knowledge, where the lowest common denominator is raised to the highest one. The learning segment presented in this paper includes and makes visible the elements sought above: namely, the preparation, the research and the experience used to design, deliver and process a learning sequence. Like in the story, the Instructor provides a “stone” by posting a pictographic ambiguous image. As each villager brings her own unique contribution to the interaction, the resulting synergy-rich “soup” belongs to everyone. Could not any community, including one of teachers and learners, dialoguing in this manner produce the same result?

Essentially, teaching begins with the belief that “The way of the teacher is a practice in trust” (Arrien, 1998). The trust involved in this case study is supported by decades of observing the learning process, and is anchored by theories of learning and of group development to active practice and risky experimentation. “Trust the process” and “Be open to outcome,” accurately describe the value-base of the primary Instructor’s teaching approach. In keeping with “the Stone Soup” metaphor, the teacher brings the cauldron, builds the fire, puts the “magic” stone into the boiling water and trusts that eventually the audience will engage enough to bring their own hidden ingredients to the process.”

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This really makes me think about The Tao of Leadership because of the feminine, nurturing way that the soldiers show their leadership. This book is my ‘Leadership Bible’ that I go to time and again for inspiration and guidance. It really is ‘process’ oriented and focused on fostering leadership from within.

This Stone Soup metaphor fits well with my thinking around having students develop the curriculum around their interests, or more aptly, their tastes. Students as leaders and creators of content for learning, as opposed to just being passive receivers.

I am combining two short posts here:

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Ordering a pizza in in the near future.

Turn your speakers on for this one… a little dark humour about living in a wired world. Ordering from Pizza Palace.

Originally posted April 6th, 2006

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One Red Paperclip

We live in a wired world where a man with a blog, and a little PR, can turn One Red Paperclip into some Real Estate.

Originally posted April 17th, 2006

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Application of Constructivist Principles to the Practice of Instructional Technology By Bonnie Skaalid

I found this while procrastinating on finishing my masters paper.

Disgusted with how this has transformed from a labour of interest and love to one of ‘hoop jumping’ that is just what I Googled… along with ‘education’. This is just what I was looking for:

Instructional Strategy Development

• Distinguish between instructional goals and learners’ goals; support learners in pursuing their own goals. Ng and Bereiter (1991) distinguish between (1) task-completion goals or hoop jumping,” (2) instructional goals set by the system, and (3) personal knowledge-building goals set by the student. The three do not always converge. A student motivated by task-completion goals doesn’t even consider learning, yet many students’ behavior in schools is driven by performance requirements. Constructivist instruction would nourish and encourage pursuit of personal knowledge-building goals, while still supporting instructional goals. As Mark Twain put it: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

…no they do not converge and no I do not feel nourished… and I should really listen to Mr. Twain!

So can technology come to the rescue?

• Allow for multiple goals for different learners. ID often includes the implicit assumption that instructional goals will be identical for all learners. This is sometimes necessary, but not always. Hypermedia learning environments almost by definition are designed to accommodate multiple learning goals. Even within traditional classrooms, technologies exist today for managing multiple learning goals (Collins, 1991).

• Appreciate the interdependency of content and method. Traditional design theory treats content and the method for teaching that content as orthogonally independent factors. Postmodern ID says you can’t entirely separate the two. When you use a Socratic method, you are teaching something quite different than when you use worksheets and a posttest. Teaching concepts via a rule definition results in something different than teaching the concept via rich cases. Just as McLuhan discerned the confounding of “media” and “message,” so designers must see how learning goals are not uniformly met by interchangeable instructional strategies (see Wilson & Cole, in preparation).

So we should be spending our time ‘designing’ learning environments… I need to look up ‘hypermedia learning environments’.

I like the focus in this next section:

• Think in terms of designing learning environments rather than selecting instructional strategies. Metaphors are important. Does the designer “select” a strategy or “design” a learning experience? Grabinger, Dunlap, and Heath (1993) provide design guidelines for what they call realistic environments for active learning (REAL); these guidelines reflect a constructivist orientation:

  • Extend students’ responsibility for their own learning.
  • -Allow students to determine what they need to learn.
  • -Enable students to manage their own learning activities.
  • -Enable students to contribute to each other’s learning.
  • -Create a non-threatening setting for learning.
  • -Help students develop metacognitive awareness.
  • Make learning meaningful.
  • -Make maximum use of existing knowledge.
  • -Anchor instruction in realistic settings.
  • -Provide multiple ways to learn content.
  • Promote active knowledge construction.
  • -Use activities to promote higher level thinking.
  • -Encourage the review of multiple perspectives.
  • -Encourage creative and flexible problem solving.
  • -Provide a mechanism for students to present their learning.

• Think of instruction as providing tools that teachers and students can use for learning; make these tools user-friendly. This frame of mind is virtually the opposite of “teacher-proofing” instructional materials to assure uniform adherence to designers’ use expectations. Instead, teachers and students are encouraged to make creative and intelligent use of instructional tools and resources.

There is so much room for creativity, the use of metaphors, and problem solving… meeting multiple goals for individual learners… as long as we invest time in making the learning meaningfully relevant, and in designing flexible learning environments.

The hardest bone to swallow here, the one that sticks in my throat as I sit here gnawing on the sparse backbone of higher learning, is that this freedom is what I desire for my own learning, but how much of it do I offer to my own students in my classroom?

How many of them are jumping through my hoops?

The first time I read that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ included components or elements of the words ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ was in James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia- A New Look at Life on Earth’ over 20 years ago, (see the wiki for Gaia Theory or a review of The Ages of Gaia). I have heard this reference literally hundreds of times since, and I have also perpetuated this idea countless times.

Well, chalk this one up as a fallacy or urban legend!

According to Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania …”crisis” (w?ij?) consists of two syllables that are written with two separate characters, w?i and j?.

The j? of w?ij?, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a w?ij? is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A w?ij? indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits.

But j? is mistakenly believed to signify opportunity because j? added to huì (“occasion”) creates the Mandarin word for ‘opportunity’ (j?huì). However by itself j? does not mean ‘opportunity’. If j? can be interpreted as “incipient moment” or “crucial point”, then the j? in ‘opportunity’ can also be a crucial point. So in both j?huì and w?ij? there are crucial points, but there is no ‘opportunity’ found in the Chinese word ‘crisis’.

The problem here is that despite the fallacy, I think that this is such a powerful metaphor to live by!

On the other hand, Mair thinks that this muddled thinking, “is a danger to society, for it lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit. Adopting a feel-good attitude toward adversity may not be the most rational, realistic approach to its solution.”

Although I agree that ‘looking for’ or ’seeking out’ a crisis in order to find an opportunity is not healthy, (I think here of hostile takeovers as an example), there is an inherent element of ‘good’ in looking for hidden opportunities when you find yourself in a crisis.

“When life feeds you lemons, make (and then sell) lemonade!”

Stafford Beer coined the term Cybernetics.
He was a brilliant man who, among other things, wrote a novel about a very wise but forgetful wizard. This excerpt tells you what he thinks of our education system. The title alone- referring to the Education Minister- should give you a hint of what is to come.

Excerpt from: Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer

From Chapter Two: A Pompous Man

The pompous man lowered himself into the visitor’s armchair.

“I have the honour to be the Chairman of the Education Committee in our little town,” he said. “As you know, education is the hope for mankind.”

Wizard Prang raised an eyebrow, but waited politely for his visitor to continue.

“It has come to my attention,” the pompous man said, “that you are the possessor of some very advanced knowledge. Our Committee has therefore passed a resolution Inviting you to give the School Prizes away on Speech Day this year and to give us a little address telling us all about it.”

…The wizard cleared his throat.

“In a hundred years or so, everyone now alive in the whole earth will be dead – is this not so?”

The pompous man was relieved. He could follow that. He nodded sagely.

“It would therefore be possible for the human race to run its affairs quite differently, in a wise and benevolent fashion, in a relatively short time.”

This way of looking at things appealed to the Chairman of the Education Committee. It had an optimistic ring, so different from the doom-laden pronouncements of most so-called clever people.

He leaned forward. “And so?” he asked encouragingly.

“The purpose of education,” said Wizard Prang, “is to make sure this doesn’t happen.”

The pompous man was thunderstruck.

“Look here, Sir,” he said, “please remember who I am. Not only do I have civic responsibilities – I am also a Pompous Man. You can’t say things like that, you know.”

The wizard was under the Impression that he just had said it, and looked around anxiously to see If anything was wrong. But things looked much as usual.

“Young people today are lazy and good-for-nothing,” declared the pompous man. He resounded. He was on familiar ground. “They sit around listening to pop music and taking drugs. What they have to do is learn more things, apply themselves.”

“No, that’s not correct,” the wizard explained, “they have to unlearn things.”

“How can that possibly be?” The pompous man was lost.

“Well,” said Wizard Prang, “we can teach only what we know. Now what we know is how to devastate the planet, kill its inhabitants, and starve two thirds of the rest. Seems a bit silly to teach people to do all that.”

“Ridiculous!” shouted the pompous man. “That is not the intention at all, and you know it.”

The wizard looked reflective. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

A few years ago, a friend sent me an invitation to join him on a social network and start something called a blog. I signed up and my first post, “The purpose of a system is what is does” set the metaphoric tone for my ideas and thoughts that will fill this space. Essentially, I think many students are square pegs that we try to put into round holes (my personal schooling experience included). I think we have a lot still to learn about education and learning, and I also think that technology might provide some bridges to help make effective pedagogy come faster, and easier.

With this in mind I now move ‘pair-a-dimes’ to it’s new and final home. It started at elgg.net which was confusing to some since elgg is an open source software platform as well as an open source blogging platform. So the name was changed to Eduspaces.net. Now Eduspaces will be managed by Taking it Global – and we were told the address would change again. Today I checked to confirm the new address and low-and-behold, Eduspaces is being kept in tact… too little, too late to keep me there! On the bright side, my old links will stay live.

So here I am, making the move out on my own. I am using a WordPress publishing platform hosted by BlueHost. I’ve had some issues with transferring my blog and so now I will move my blog post-by-post over to this site. I’m taking advantage of this ‘problem’ by reading, reflecting, (and fixing old links) as I go.

Once again, I bring you my thoughts and reflections on education, technology & learning. I invite you to join in the conversation and add your ‘couple of dimes worth’. Or, challenge yourself to use technology in a transformative way in your classroom. Or, ask yourself why we are stuck in a paradigm that suggests changes to education need to be slow and progressive? Be part of the conversation, be part of the solution, be an active learner who shares ideas with others. Do so, and I thank you for contributing to my learning!

Dave.

Think Good Thoughts,
Say Good Words,
Do Good Deeds.