We just completed a vacation in Xi’an, one of China’s oldest cities and the starting point for the silk road. The silk road was the first gateway to and from the Orient, it was the first real global link to the ‘Eastern’ countries of India and China. Trade of spices and silk, as well as cultural exchanges, started to take shape and lay the foundation for ‘world trade’ long before Europeans ‘discovered’ the America’s (in their quest for a shorter route to the East). This was the first of many ‘windows’ open to a new, more connected and more multicultural world.

While in Xi’an we witnessed the celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Communist Party. In a very patriotic country, with only one time zone, the festivities were focused primarily in the capital city of Beijing, and so a vast majority of Chinese were glued to their televisions to see what was a really spectacular parade, on a scale only possible in a country with over a billion people. A very conservative guess would put 25,000 plus participants in the parade, and more than double the population of North America (including Mexico) sitting in front of televisions watching it. Even more ‘windows’ were open as live streaming of the event also happened via the internet.

Until fairly recently, China was a very closed society. Outside of Hong Kong, very few exchanges of information occurred (for the general masses) beyond what was shared from the times of the silk road. Of course this is a blatant exaggeration, but my point is that the central government held a tight grip on what products and information most Chinese got to see from outside the Great Wall. Things changed dramatically about 30 years ago, thanks to Mr. Deng Xiaoping.

On our trip, our tour guide Tony shared a lot of Chinese history beyond just the touristy sites we visited. On one excursion Tony told us about the much revered Mr. Deng loosely quoting him, “A country is just like a house, it has windows and gates. If you close the window, you get no fresh air, and also no flies. But if you open the window fresh air comes in and also some flies.” This marked the first step in China opening many windows and doors to the outside world. Yes, with the fresh air, some flies will follow, but China has become a world economical powerhouse because of it’s choice to ‘open the windows’. What I find interesting is that the one key window they still try to screen (filter) is the internet, much like many schools do today. But there are so many ways to get through the screens and so many tools to help you do it. It’s a battle not really worth fighting, yet in order to keep some of the ‘flies’ out, a lot of fresh air is also filtered out.

Mr Deng was smart enough to realize that an ‘open’ policy would bring with it some things that were not desirable, but that closing the ‘window’ would be far less desirable. I think this ‘open window’ metaphor continues to exemplify my concerns with schools filtering the internet. We fear the flies, and so the windows get shut… thus we also lose a lot of ‘fresh air’. I’ve already mentioned that we need to remove the bubble wrap from our schools, and expressed in that post why filters actually hinder rather than help in education. We need to educate students about the world of information available to them on the internet. We need to teach them to search for information intelligently and we need to show them how to avoid the ‘flies’. We… teach… them!

We also need to teach students to be tolerant of others. To be respectful of other cultures and other ways of doing things. To treat each other with dignity and generosity and to offer friendship… face-to-face and online.

Tony shared another quote by Mr. Deng, “No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat, as long as it could get a mouse it is a good cat” and as Tony continued he explained, “So, no matter who you are, if you do good deeds you are a meaningful person.”

From every country, from every part of the world, from every culture, there have been wise men and women who have thoughtfully shared values that transcend the time and place they come from. Thirty years ago, Mr. Deng was not really talking about windows, flies and coloured cats, he was talking about openness and acceptance. The leaders of today may not always share these ideas, but the school of today can help to ensure that these ideas are valued in the years to come.

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

“I can do that without technology” -Actually no you can’t!

Here is the Slideshare.

This was the presentation I first created for BLC08, and I wrote about it here.

I’ve finally edited it for the web… a tedious task as I tend to use a lot of slide transitions that do not convert well to individual slides. I shared a few presentation notes on this Slideshare, but not too much. This is a great feature I’ll probably use more in the future.

Here again is the Ustream: This version was done for student teachers at Simon Fraser University. As a video, it has a slow start with student teachers discussing a statement, and sharing ideas until about the 13 minute mark. Also, the slides in this video won’t match perfectly to the Slideshare above as I had to explain some of the slides for the stand-alone slide show, but it would be easy to connect the two presentations.

I’ll be using some of this presentation as the intro to one of my BLC09 presentations:

The P.O.D.s are coming!

What are PODS? They are Personally Owned Devices, and they are already infiltrating our schools. For now they get tucked away in lockers and backpacks, but as the saying goes, “If there is an elephant in the room, introduce it!” Students are bringing small machines with huge potential into our schools. It is time to introduce these tools into our classrooms and also to make sure that we have the knowledge and the infrastructure to use them to their fullest potential.

And I’ll probably link to this post in my PODs presentation. I first discussed PODs here.

It’s nice to finally be able to share this presentation and as always, I’m offering it with a CC license:

Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.

When my grandfather was a teenager in the Ukraine, he played his accordion for the ‘moving pictures’. He was a member of the band that would play scripted music as damsels in distress were first tied to train tracks by villains, then rescued by heroes.

The music the band played added life to the moving pictures and helped to set the mood or build suspense. Essentially another channel of meaningful information was added to these silent moving pictures… the new channel improved this form of media and created something greater than what was there before.

For his services, my grandfather received two paid entries to these same movies, 20 cents worth of tickets. He would watch movies again and again, and he would charge friends 5 cents (half price) for his second ticket, to earn some pocket change. But never would he sell both tickets, he loved the movies too much. Eventually he would own a cinema, and his fascination and appreciation for movies stuck with him his entire life.

The idea of moving pictures marveled people in these early days! Today we can be momentarily entertained by movies such as this, but not unexpectedly, we expect more from a movie today.

Just as we expect more from our movies and our entertainment, I think our students expect (or at least should expect) more from their classroom experiences today. On a very simple level, how is a poster board different than Glogster or Museum Box? How is an encyclopedia different than wikipedia?

But so often when we make such comparisons, there is the notion of ‘out with the old and in with the new’… this very notion seems to set people off about how we can’t replace the classics or ‘I can do that without technology’. Both of these views miss the point.

We may not be captivated by the ‘damsel in distress’ movies of the past, but we can marvel at the comedic social commentary of Charlie Chaplin; We can study and learn from the the visual story telling of Orson Wells.

We can find value in old black and white films and likewise we can find value in using some important lessons learned in education. We can appreciate quality and learn from what works… BUT… we can’t pretend that times haven’t changed. We can’t hold on to a black and white world.

In one of the most compelling podcasts I’ve heard in a while, Michael Wesch says:

In these rooms… that we are teaching there is literally something in the air that is changing the game completely, and that something in the air is nothing less than 1.5 billion people connecting all around the world… we need to learn how to educate in this media-scape.

If you look at all futurists, all predictions, they all agree on one trend, and that is that we are moving towards… Ubiquitous networks, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous information, at unlimited speed, about everything, everywhere, from anywhere, on all kinds of devices.

…and meanwhile… scantrons are still happening in our schools where we are testing people for whether or not they are knowledgeable. What I am going to argue is that we have to move from being knowledgeable to actually creating students that are knowledge-able, that is able to critique and analyze and find and share and evaluate information.

It is less about leaving old ways in the dust and more about using the resources available to us. We have always wanted students to think for themselves, to be able to critique and analyze and evaluate what they’ve learned… we just have to do so using a current model. Wesch continues with a question, and his 3-part answer:

How can we create students who can create meaningful connections?

1. Engage in real problems that actually matter to students,
2. Do it with students, and
3. Do this recognizing and harnessing the existing media environment… (including libraries!)

It goes back to this simple realization:

How many channels of information do our students experience outside of our classes? How many in our classes?

We can still watch an old black and white movie, but we don’t go out and buy a black & white tv that limits our ability to see what is available to us in colour. Yet we place unnecessary limits on what can happen in our schools and classrooms, “we need to learn how to educate in this media-scape”.

A couple days ago Heidi Hass Gable shared this with me:

This is from her 10 year old daughter who said,
“Mom, I have mostly the same homework as yesterday, so I just circled it, wrote copy, then wrote paste on today’s page.”

Last week my 9 year old asked me a question. My answer was ‘I don’t know’ so she got up, walked over to the computer and asked Google.

Information is now easily copied, pasted, edited, added to, archived, and accessed. We can look at these two events above and think ‘how cute’, or we can think of them having a little deeper meaning.

Students today experience the fluidity and availability of information in a different way than we did. Unlike my parents, I’m not spending money on a Junior Encyclopedia for my kids. Their bookshelf is the same shelf you are reading this post on, and it is richer, multi-modal, more interactive, easier to access and freely available.

So how should this change what we do in education? How much focus should we place on rote memorization? Should we spend more time teaching kids how to find the information they want more efficiently? What do we want them to do with information?

What’s the purpose of school? How has this changed in the last 2-3 years? And how will this change in the next 5 years?

“How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?”

That was the question that US Senator and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama asked on LinkedIn. A day later I posted response #1421. Here it is:

The definition for ‘Entrepreneur’ came from Google using ‘define: entrepreneur’, but I did not link to it since the link does not work.(www.onlinewbc.gov/docs/starting/glossary.html).

What I did link to was a very gifted student’s blog post- (you’ve seen it here before), a Time Magazine Article found in this student’s del.icio.us links tagged ‘gifted’, and my Square Peg, Round Hole post.

I don’t think that the purpose of our educational system is to ‘produce entrepreneurs’ but it seems fairly evident to me that we should be fostering the kind of thinking that entrepreneurs possess in our flat world.

I also don’t think that we need to cater specifically to gifted students… on the contrary, what we do to fill their educational needs, to challenge them, and to catalyze their creativity, can (and will) help every student become more ingenious.

In his recent post, “Who are we really failing“, (which also links to the Time Magazine Article above), Christopher D. Sessums points to a year-old post about a debate, “Transforming Learning: Evolution or Revolution“. In this post, Christopher says:

“Is framing the debate of transformation as an evolutionary or revolutionary process the correct way to look at the current situation? Might there be a better set of metaphors? How might the notion of emergence fit this proposition? What might Paulo Freire think?”

I think the answer is in the question… it isn’t an evolutionary or revolutionary process… it is a transformation that has qualities of both evolution and revolution. There has been a metamorphosis in the way people connect, relate, communicate, and inquire. With regards to schools, education, and learning, you might say that we are in a cocoon right now. Some of us only know what it means to be a caterpillar, others see the potential of being a butterfly, and none of us know where our wings can take us.

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Painting from ‘Aquatic Origins’ exhibit by Michelle McGauchie. (Used with permission from the artist.)

Prelude
Two Brothers, Craig and Marc Kielburger, are my modern day heroes.
Tonight Marc is having dinner with Oprah Winfrey. The brothers’ US office is hosted by Oprah. They have had an audience with Mother Teresa. They have been featured on Oprah, CNN, CBC, BBC, and 60 Minutes. They are sought after speakers that have shared the podium a number of times with former U.S. president Bill Clinton, as well as with such world renowned leaders as Nelson Mandela, Queen Noor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.
But that is not why they are heroes to me.

Take the fame (and the accolades mentioned below) away, and they are still my heroes: Two brothers under 30 years old. Many of their accomplishments began when they were well under 20. In fact, they began to change the world when they were 11 and 13 years of age.

Craig and Marc are the founders of Me to We and Free the Children, the largest organization in the world of children helping children. They inspire kids to “Be the Change”, to make a meaningful difference in the world… and their army of inspired kids have benefited over 1/2 a million needy people in the world… WOW!

Helping Others
I heard Marc speak (for the second time) on Friday. After his talk, he spoke with students and teachers from our school. Our Me to We club is raising money for Free the Children. Under the direction of a teacher, Sarah, our students have raised over $9,000 so far. My 24 Hour Famine/Sleep-Over at the school will raise another 2-3 thousand, and yet another teacher Chris will make at least that much with Freezie sales as the weather warms up.

Last year we bought goats to give families an income and thus help students go to school. This year we are raising money to build a school in Sierra Leone. Sarah wanted to raise between 10 and 15 thousand. Thanks to countless students, their families and all of our staff, it looks like we will surpass that!

In the service of others we learn meaningful lessons ourselves. Mark spoke of developing empathy in kids. In so doing, he wondered if standardized testing ‘taught’ our kids anything meaningful? When do they learn about empathy and love?

They learn this from being in the servicing of others. Listening to Marc, a true hero, has taught me something very valuable.

Helping Me, and My Family
Every night when I put my kids to bed I ask them a question… “What was your favorite part of the day?” My kids will often offer up a list. My oldest daughter is very compassionate, she makes an effort to mention at least one event in which my wife or I are in one of her favorite parts of the day. My younger daughter meanders a bit… she is still learning… sometimes she has a list, sometimes her favorite is tempered with, “But you know what I didn’t like about today?”

When I heard Mark speak, I wondered about another question I have stopped asking: “What did you learn today?” I also thought of the question my friend Mike asks his (older) kids: “What questions did you ask today?” … this is a better question than ‘what did you learn?’, but not one that inspires meaningful answers from my Grade 2 child… even less from my preschooler. After listening to mark, I decided on a new question:

“Who did you help today?”

It is simple. It inspires empathy. It shows what we truly value… and I look forward to the day when my daughters ‘favorite part of the day’ is also the answer to ‘who did you help today’.

My Heroes

Thanks for the inspiration Mark!

Please take the time to find out more about my heroes. Or better yet, GET INVOLVED !

Marc is a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. He, “has been recognized for his vision and leadership with Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 award and has received an Ashoka Fellowship for his innovation and commitment to social change. He is the youngest person ever to be awarded the Ontario Medal for Good Citizenship and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate of education from Nipissing University for his work in leadership development. Marc has been honoured as a 2007 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.”

Craig “has received many awards for his work, including the Nelson Mandela Human Rights Award, the World Economic Forum GLT Award, the Roosevelt Freedom Medal, the Governor General’s Medal of Meritorious Service, the Human Rights Award from the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations and the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child, also known as the Children’s Nobel Prize.” Oh, and Craig is also a 2002 and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He is a Megastar. (Read this last link to learn about Craig’s inspiration, and a hero in his own right, Iqbal Masih 1982-1995.)

Free the Children has recently been awarded one of ten Million-Dollar Awards from the Skoll Foundation.

Images by carf on flickr. Imprisoned… & Children of the World Unite – I (see comments in my reflection)

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From:David
Sent:May 10, 2004 9:55 PM
To: [Our Math Learning Team, my principal, and a few other people whose opions I value]
Subject: School Goal(s)

Hey,
I’ve been bouncing these ideas around and would like to get your slant.

The BIG IDEA
One overall school goal of”Articulate Thinking”

Building the skills necessary to develop articulate students who can express their thoughts in meaningful, articulate ways.

The Philosophical Bent
I don’t really care if my daughters, upon graduation, can identify the subordinate clause in a sentence or if they can tell me how to find the volume of a cone… I do care that they can express themselves in thoughtful, meaningful ways and demonstrate social responsibility in their decision making.

The GOAL(s)
1 main goal that we always focus on… especially with regards to our all-writes/ or our testing,
3 sub goals, but we only focus on one per year… across the curriculum!

Main Goal: Social Responsibility
Sub goals:
Year 1 – Structure of writing – Form, grammar, etc.
Year 2 – Verbal – speeches, presentations etc.
Year 3 – Visual/Spacial – charts, data, displaying information, etc.
(It could work that we divide this into terms and do all 3 per year, but I think 1 per year lets us keep it simple and focussed!)

The Buy In
So, how do we focus on one per year… across the curriculum? And how do we get ALL teachers involved?
In every class, we make a commitment to challenge students with a critical thinking challenge monthly or bimonthly. The topic of the challenge is course specific and preferably integrated with other subjects.
Examples
CAPP: Casa Guatemala, Multiculturalism, Bullying etc.
Social Studies: Current Issues, Religions etc.
Math: Problem Solving with real life application, Dream house, Planning a party, etc.
Science: E3 – Environment, Experiments, Ethics
Explorations: (examples)
Tech-Ed: Build a birdhouse that fits these minimum requirements… but these are the sizes of wood you are limited to…
Computers: Use [insert program here] to present the following information in a meaningful way
Home Ec.: These are the sizes of the individual pieces of material you will need for this sewing project…
place them on this 1m x 1m piece of material so that you waste the least amount of material.
*Key idea… focus on critical challenges that force students to express and justify their ideas.
We have the opportunity to build and sequence these during pro-d!

How the Sub Goals work
Year 1 – Structure of writing – All of the challenges above have a written component and EVERY teacher has a part of their marking rubric factor in Form/Convention/Grammar … Structure of writing.
Year 2 – Verbal – All of the challenges above have a presentation component and EVERY teacher has a part of their marking rubric factor in verbal communication of ideas.
Year 3 – Visual/Spacial – All of the challenges above contain data collection and/or graphing etc., and EVERY teacher has a part of their marking rubric factor in visual representation of the information/ material.

This is not done for every project, but in each class, one of these assignments is expected every 2-3 months.

Back to the BIG GOAL
***The sub goals allow us to micro-teach the necessary skills needed to improve how we express ideas in written form, in our verbal communication and our ability to visually display information… skills that allow us to express our thoughts in articulate ways.
The main goal… Social Responsibility.. is where we collect our data to see how we are progressing… to give us feedback on how well students are doing, (and for that matter how well we are doing at teaching them these skills across the curriculum).
Once a term, or twice a year, we test kids using a critical question based on Social Responsibility topics. These would still be taught in CAPP and Advisory, and hopefully also taught in other areas… looking at the environment in Science, waste reduction in Tech Ed and Home Ec. etc.

How students are expected to respond to the critical question would depend on what year/sub goal we are focusing on:
Year 1 – Structure of writing – Essays
Example: Moral dilemmas
Year 2 – Verbal – speeches, presentations, etc.
Example: Speech on Bullying; Develop an Anti-smoking ad campaign… You must ’sell’ this idea to your class.
Year 3 – Visual/Spacial – charts, data, displaying information, etc.
Example: Develop a 10 question survey on peer pressure and display your findings in a meaningful way.

Well there you go!
I’d like to hear what you think,

Dave

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Gary wrote:

Ahh, what do you want me to say? It sounds like it could be a unifying concept that the school could rally around. Kind of like Joey’s old EBS, but with an academic slant.

I might argue that these goals are already taught by your Language Art teachers, so the main benefit is that everyone is working towards the same outcome. To that point, the LA teachers touch on those skills every year. The main problem, as I see it, isn’t that we aren’t doing a good job teaching these skills, it is that we have 5 – 20 % of the kids who don’t get it. These are the kids that we need to focus our goals on – these are the ones where academic interventions are required. If we add more teachers teaching a concept, the real question is to what extent are we going to improve the ability of the 5 – 20 %ers? If we aren’t going to improve their skills, then don’t set the goals.

In saying that, perhaps all of our students need to be more articulate thinkers? If so, than this is a well thought out plan!

Good luck,
Gary

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David wrote:

It often comes down to that 5-20% doesn’t it?
I wonder what we are doing now that isn’t working with that group? Is there some school somewhere that handles this group well?
I’m not sure I challenge this group in a way that gets the most out of them, but then I spend too much time on giving them info (not a lot of time on the 3 higher levels of blooms taxonomy). If we challenged kids to think about ‘no right answer’ kinds of questions in every class, maybe we would be challenging and hopefully exciting some of these kids… maybe this is wishful thinking.

I can’t help but wonder what is wrong with the structure of education that limits us from connecting with these kids???? If you built your own school what would be different?

Maybe a good discussion for our book club… not ‘perfect world’ education, but given the resources we have, what would we do differently if we had the budget of a current school and carte blanche permission to make the school look and operate any way we felt?

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Gary wrote:

Well Dave…

One must first challenge some age old assumptions. Our system is built on the belief that “every kid can learn.” Second, we believe that every teacher can teach every child. Thirdly, we assume that every child should be “with their appropriate age grouping.”

If we want to unlock the potential of our students, these assumptions must be examined.

Can every child learn? Developmental psychologist will answer by saying “maybe.” Developmentally, many of our students, especially at the middle level, are stunted in their thinking. They lack the ability to “integrate” the sensory world. They lack the ability to temper dual thoughts. They even lack the adaptive process that we assume all people possess. So their answer to that question is “maybe.” For students to learn, Gordon Neufeld says they must be ready.

Can every teacher teach every child? Come on, we all know that we can’t be all things to everyone. Even good teachers will eventually meet their match.

Finally, should every child be with their appropriate age? I’m of the opinion that the greatest thing in our kids lives is their peers. So much so, that peer pressure is ruining their lives. Students don’t come to school to learn, they come to school to meet their friends. A true cart before the horse analogy. Again, Neufeld would suggest that this very notion of peer influence is what is causing some kids to be unable to learn. He believes peers stunt our growth and block us from learning.

So, the solution?

I will put a computer in every students hand. I would keep students in “similar age groupings”, but I wouldn’t guarantee their same age grouping. I would differentiate all learning, but I would try to cluster learning objectives so that teachers can continue to play a crucial role in learning and still be the main facilitator for learning. The computer, in its ideal form, is the tool that allows us to individualize student work. It will allow us to communicate in real time, learn in real time, and assess in real time. It will be the lever to better learning. Teachers, however, will need to be better than ever before. They will be the fuel for the flame.

My middle school would thus have grade 6 – 8 classes. Some students would remain in the class for only a year before going on to grade 9. Others might stay for four years. Teams of teachers would still work together to deliver the curriculum, but the interaction and model would be much different than today. Some genius will lay out the curriculum into standards and objectives that are clear and easy to follow. Teachers will bring the objectives to life, and technology will allow students to demonstrate their learning in ways unimaginable only a few short years ago. Problem based learning and rich task learning will be for the masses. For our 5 – 20 %, reading recovery, math recovery, writing recovery will be their focus. We won’t be ashamed to actually help people progress.

Finally, students will come to school to learn.

Is it possible?

G

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My thoughts on this conversation:

It was great to re-read this and see where my thinking was 3 years ago… it was before I saw the value of technology in education, and yet it wasn’t very long ago!

I thought this was pretty insightful of Gary, “Teachers will bring the objectives to life, and technology will allow students to demonstrate their learning in ways unimaginable only a few short years ago. Problem based learning and rich task learning will be for the masses.”

This idea of many students not fitting into school, or rather schools not fitting many students, has been a something I have considered a lot… especially in my Square Peg, Round Hole post. The concept of being socially responsible applies equally if not more so in this technological age, (note: my Blogging Rules).

“One overall school goal of ‘Articulate Thinking’. Building the skills necessary to develop articulate students who can express their thoughts in meaningful, articulate ways.” This might have been a lofty goal three years ago, but after reading Thomas Friedman’s (original version of) The World Is Flat 3.0 and watching David Warlick, maybe it is time that education focussed on, as Gary suggests ‘differentiating all learning’. It is the side trips of learning that students enjoy. Maybe when we are better at meeting students needs, they will have the motivation to meaningfully participate… and therefore be more compelled to be the ‘Articulate Thinkers’ they need to be in the 21st Century!

A composition of other people’s thoughts and ideas… with a theme.

How to Bring our Schools Out of the 20th Century by Claudia Wallis, Sonja Steptoe, Time Magazine cover story Dec. 18, 2006

“For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.”

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An Alien in an Alien World by David Warlick,

“I wonder how many natural mathematicians, engineers, artists, composers, story tellers and innovators we are wasting, when we measure our schools almost exclusively on their ability to produce good test takers.

How many natural born leaders are we squandering as we teach them to listen, watch, follow direction, regurgitate facts, to sit down and shut up. How many leaders are we losing when we teach them to be taught — in stead of teaching them to teach.

How alien are our classrooms?”

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Do schools today kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.

“Truthfully what happens is that, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waste up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side…”

“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

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The eternal question… Why? by Kris, a 15 year old I had the pleasure of teaching.

Here it is from a student who will be a lifelong learner, dare I say… despite her schooling. She is the one that sent me the time article above, which got me thinking about compiling this post.

“To the adult readers out there: this is how public education is contributing to your child’s success. We list the qualities we have in one column, the qualities we don’t in another, and write about how the qualities we have will make us nice, successful white collar workers someday, coupled with a post-secondary education and a Graduation Portfolio with bureacratically-documented evidence (signed in triplicate) of us kissing the toes of their shiny black shoes.

Of course, like every student who hopes of one day becoming a successful, white collar worker, the answer I intend to put down is a lot less sarcastic and a lot more Ministry-friendly. There is satisfaction in lashing out at public education on a blog, and there is self-preservation in doing exactly what they tell you on the work you hand in. I have a hunch the Ministry won’t like it, but I still wonder, as I hope others will: “Why?”

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Adopt and Adept by Marc Prensky

“…technology adoption… It’s typically a four-step process:

1. Dabbling.
2. Doing old things in old ways.
3. Doing old things in new ways.
4. Doing new things in new ways.

…Some people will no doubt worry that, with all this experimentation, our children’s education will be hurt. “When will we have time for the curriculum,” they will ask, “and for all the standardized testing being mandated?” If we really offered our children some great future-oriented content (such as, for example, that they could learn about nanotechnology, bioethics, genetic medicine, and neuroscience in neat interactive ways from real experts), and they could develop their skills in programming, knowledge filtering, using their connectivity, and maximizing their hardware, and that they could do so with cutting-edge, powerful, miniaturized, customizable, and one-to-one technology, I bet they would complete the “standard” curriculum in half the time it now takes, with high test scores all around. To get everyone to the good stuff, the faster kids would work with and pull up the ones who were behind.

In other words, if we truly offer our kids an Edutopia worth having, I believe our students will work as hard as they can to get there.

So, let’s not just adopt technology into our schools. Let’s adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it, until we reach the point where we and our kids truly feel we’ve done our very best. Then, let’s push it and pull it some more. And let’s do it quickly, so the twenty-second century doesn’t catch us by surprise with too much of our work undone.

A big effort? Absolutely. But our kids deserve no less.”

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Animal School- by R.Z. Greenwald… Curriculum: Running, Flying, Climbing, and Swimming

(Click this button in the link provided to view this movie/slideshow)

Schools do not make accommodations for individual talents and learning styles. A slide show of a story I read a long time ago… still priceless!

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Creativity Killer: Discouraging creativity in children, © Leslie Owen Wilson, 1997, 2004

“It is perhaps ironic that within our culture we insist that we place such value on creativity and then blatantly try to steal it away from children in the contexts of their educational experiences and their upbringing. As a culture we need to finally decide what we really want for our children and then carefully design and monitor experiences which provide those things we value.”

This has links to 3 versions of The Little Boy by Helen Buckley.

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Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck? by Kathy Sierra

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Where do we go from here? We can keep looking at Kathy Sierra for the answer!

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I started this blog with a post titled, The purpose of a system is what it does, and I started this post with a ‘Time’ (or perhaps ‘Timeless’) article that states in the second paragraph,

“American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.”

Incremental changes will not take us where we need to be. Standardized testing, outdated curriculum and unwired classrooms won’t get us there. Teachers using a white Smart Board to simply replace the green chalk board, which replaced the blackboard, won’t get us there.

What profound change is needed? I don’t think one teacher at a time can do it. What is going to get us over the Big Frickin’ Wall?

Note my “Articulate Thinkers” post, Jan. 29/07, based on an e-mail ‘conversation’ I had almost three years ago…

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Dec. 18. It has been a while since I looked at Christopher D. Sessums’ Weblog. He just added me to his friends list here on eduspaces and I visited his blog again. I found his post with this apple commercial… which pays tribute to the misfits/the crazies/ the ‘Round Pegs in the Square Holes’.

It reminded me of the main reason I wrote this post, which I alluded to, but didn’t really mention. Many of the Square/Round Peg Students (that don’t fit into our other-shaped schools) are the future thinkers/dreamers/innovators that are going to meaningfully change our world. We need to recognize their future value… We have an obligation to nurture them, and to develop their enthusiasm for learning. It isn’t just about not stifling creativity or not making schools so alien… it is about creating an environment where every child can thrive… Not making the misfits fit, but rather helping them create a space that fits them. [I think that the technology is now available to make this easier!]

Jan. 8th. Kris directs me to this Story from the Front-Lines. (A teacher’s frustration with pegs and holes.)

And I’m demoralized, as I’m now having to tell kids, “A paragraph is an idea – unless your teacher tells you it’s five to seven sentences, and then that’s what it is.”

Jan. 16th. I found this in the inaugural post of madamespider, yet another example of a student’s frustration…

“Let me just say this: I hate school with a passion. You’ll never find someone who loves education more than I do, don’t get me wrong, but as far as I’m concerned, school is not education. I believe one should learn because they want to and understand the value of knowledge, not have it shoved down their throats by the school board or government or whoever.”

…and here again, in reaction to this post, is madamespider,

“Looking back on the talks and ’specialists’ they tried to send me to within the school, I now realize that they were treating me as if I had a behavior problem or learning disability. Like I needed their support to do better. That’s not what I needed. I needed something to make it matter to me. That’s what I still need.”

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Feb. 3rd, 07 Here is a quote from Bruce Springsteen,

“I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system. One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive — very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure [get lost]. Most of the schools, they’re aiming to build you up and get you into the machine.”

I found this on ‘The Genius in All of Us‘ blog by David Shenk… this is an interesting blog to explore further!

Here is the gem I took from David Warlick’s Keynote “Derailing Education“. Warlick is referring to Friedman’s ‘Experts’ and ‘Adaptable People’… from The World Is Flat.

“These are the kinds of people that need to be coming out of our classrooms, people who know how to make themselves an expert and people who can learn, and unlearn, and relearn very easily.

“This is why the foundation of education systems today should not be the rails, but it should be the side trips. It should not be the central standard curriculum, but it should be those directions that students, that learners, both teachers and students, can navigate to on their own. We have the ability to do that today.

I really like what Warlick says here, and as a classroom teacher I know how much fun those ’side trips’ can be. A great metaphor here, on the theme of learners navigating on their own, is the teacher as the compass. We point in a direction, (not necessarily the direction that the student is going), and we are a reference point or guide to the learning. As students sail (rather than ride the rails) they must choose their destination, (what they want to learn), and tack and adjust their path as they go… using the teacher as a compass that keeps them on their ‘learning’ course.

Challenges

• Students and teachers need to know how to sail- they need to be literate in these new ways of learning and communicating. They must be adaptable, willing to course-correct as they go.
• Students and teachers need to seek out other sailors- communities of learners, online this too could be considered a literacy issue . (Note my last blog.)
• Students must bring their own sails- and not all sails are created equally, the metaphor can work with sails being competency (skills), motivation, handicaps (the ability to function physically, emotionally, intellectually (not everyone has the same sized sail), and technically (the ‘new’ literacy issue again)).
• Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.
• Teachers need to be ‘useful’ compasses- “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the Moon” comes to mind here… also think of using technology for learning rather than using technology to teach. If students steer themselves, they will take us into uncharted water, and we need to be able to point the way even when we may not know the best course of action. (It isn’t about ‘right’ answers, it is about the journey- this goes back to Warlick’s [or rather Toffler's] idea that learners (students and teachers) need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time.
• Schools provide the boats, (and some have holes!)- resources, technology, and structure. You can also think of the boats as the curriculum, the (way too big) frame used to support (or should I say slow down) the learning.

OK, so I may have gone a little too far with the metaphor. However it makes the point that there are a lot of challenges to providing a meaningful education in this day and age. Having said that, I am keenly aware that it is my practice, my willingness to be a lifelong learner, and my knowledge of how and where to ‘point’ that limits what can happen in my classroom.

Consider this: Ten years ago I could only type using the ‘hunt and peck’ approach. Six years ago I had an Apple Macintosh, with turtle-slow internet access, in my classroom. Less than a year ago I had never built a web page. I still struggle with a lot of the terminology at sites like Techcrunch, and it still takes me over an hour of tinkering to do something any ‘techie’ could do in 20 minutes.

The learning curve is huge, and the gap of what I know and what I need to know is growing exponentially. The fact is, teachers are no longer capable of being the ‘keepers’ and ‘distributors’ of knowledge. In fact, our generation of teachers are less equipped than students to keep up. I come from the Batman era, adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating technology into their lives.

In late March of this year I started on this website with a blog titled The purpose of a system is what it does. But our current system is currriculum driven, and it can be difficult to take side trips, (in fact it is outright impossible in some of the advanced classes with Provincial Exams). However, if we really want our students to be the future Experts and Adaptable ’sailors’ of the world, then not only do we need to stay abreast of the ‘new literacy’ but the structures in our classrooms, and our schools need to change.

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On a related topic, Warlick’s ideas about Geography changing is also good. Marcie T. Hull does a succinct summary of Geography becoming more like time.

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A well said rant on the problems with rote learning and why we need creative thinkers:

Why Malaysia needs creative thinkers

by: Suresh Gnasegarah

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Jan. 17th, ‘07 – I found a wonderful post by Subbaraman Iyer:

The education and learning approaches

The Education paradigm emphasizes acquiring a body of knowledge, “right” information, once and for all.

The Learning paradigm emphasizes on learning how to learn, how to ask good questions, pay attention to the right things, be open to evaluating new concepts and having access to information. It emphasizes the importance of context.

The Education approach is to treat learning as a product, a destination; and the learning approach is to treat learning as a process or a journey

The Education approach consists of a relatively rigid structure and a standard curriculum and a prescribed approach to teach, whereas the learning approach consists of a relatively flexible curriculum and belief that there are many different was to teach a given subject.

(I want to quote the whole post!)…Read the rest of this at his site!

Not long ago, if a group of ‘gamers’ got together for Dungeons and Dragons, people saw it as strange. Teenagers bonding by getting together and creating alter egos, or characters and living out a fantasy. Role Playing Gamers were sometimes perceived as a ‘fringe’ group of lost souls that lack a full grip on reality.

To me, Raph Koster’s “A Story About A Tree” is about how the gamers of the past are finding refuge on-line. But what used to be a ‘fringe’ activity is now mainstream. Communities are growing on-line with a multitude of interests, well beyond gaming. Pick an interest and you can find like-minded individuals seeking a group to belong to. And now role playing is something we all do to some extent. How many alter ego’s do you have on the net? (e-mail names, e-bay, pogo, Flickr, elgg, blogs) How many ‘conversations’ have you had with someone in another country or half-way around the world, having never met them, or even known their given name? How many conversations will you have with them before you call them a friend… care for them… plant a tree in their memory?

Benefits to this: A chance to find a community that you feel you ‘belong’ to regardless of age, sex, race, looks, nationality, disability, obesity, personality… Someone alone without anyone to love, or be loved by can connect, create friendships, relate, orate, pontificate, debate, find a date… and subsequently mate. Escape.

Costs: Human touch, a real smile , a disconnect with the ‘real’ world, even a dissatisfaction with life. Other potential costs can include a group of acquaintances rather than friends, a child being preyed on, or hate groups making connections and recruiting. More directly, a lack of exercise, apathy, obesity, complacency, indecency. Escape.

Long gone is the era of Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, neighbourhood barbecues, family picnics, going to church, or even helping thy neighbour. We still have sports teams, but what about the unathletic, uncoordinated, and uninterested? What do we have for them now?

What we have is a Second Life where you can watch virtual ‘reality tv’! In this virtual life you can fly, look better, find friends, share time… even talk, (or rather type). Who would pass up such an opportunity when the alternative is an unresponsive television or the realization that “I have nothing else to do”.

This started out as a story about a tree, and it will end with the planting of some seeds…

How will we use the community building aspects of the internet to foster learning in schools?

How do we make schools into ‘modern day’ learning communities?

How do we get students to engage rather than escape?

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Useful links:

High Tech, Forget the High Touch
-read this as well as the two contrasting editorials it links to.

Passively Multiplayer Online Games for Schools?
-Learning as a game -watch the video, monitoring your web-life and ‘measuring’ it like you would measure skill sets in Warcraft and other multiplayer games – “myware” not spyware.

Second Life by Bethany aka Old Man Dragonfly (doesn’t that fit well with my alter ego comment) -Good summary of many ideas (including mine:-) A lot of links I should explore!

Second to None by Jonathan Dunn notes that on-line friends are becoming as meaningful to people as their real-world friend. It has links to research as well as to this BBC article Virtual pals ’soar in importance’.