Category: Kids and Learning

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A Confluence of Influence

You may think it a little indulgent, but every year the Edublog Awards are held to recognise those educators who have somehow managed to use blogs in a way that might be worthy of some acknowledgment.  Whilst there will always be those who criticise awards programs as being too elitist, too self-promotional, too biased or too just plain wanky, I think it’s great that there is this opportunity for those who are using blogging for educational purposes to get some sort of recognition for it, and also to uncover a whole lot of new blogs and bloggers that may not have been in your feeds.  Thankfully, the nomination and voting procedures got a complete overhaul this year that will hopefully see them be a lot fairer and less open to manipulation than in past years.

At the risk of sounding self-promotional and wanky, I just wanted to say how surprised I am to have not one, but two nominations this year in the Most Influential Blogpost category.  To the folks that proposed the two nominations, thanks, I really appreciate it.

The first post, The New Digital Divide, was about change and how the divide between those who “get” technology and those who don’t seems to be getting bigger.  It focused on the development of personal learning networks and online communities as ways for education leaders to connect and stay ahead of the curve…

A new Digital Divide is emerging as the connected educators find each other. A few years ago, these bleeding edge edutechies were the exception. They were isolated in their schools. They did great things with kids but worked mostly in a vacuum because they were so rare that there was usually no one in the school to share their craziness with. But the rise of networked intelligence has changed that. These people are finding each other and forming alliances. They are conversing and sharing with each other. Their networks are amplifying their voices, and allowing them to connect in ways that their less connected colleagues don’t really understand, and through this connected amplification, they are starting to have a real voice.

The second post, The Truth Is Out There, started off talking about the use of mobile phones for learning at my own school, and then spread into a wider discussion of where the boundaries lie with regard to the use of portable devices and how schools define curriculum…

It doesn’t matter what field of endeavour you think about, from archeologists to zoologists the real measure is not how many marks they got in a test of rote memory, but in how well they are able to use the resources at their disposal to solve the problems in front of them. If that means they need to Google for an answer, call someone for a second opinion, or grab the manual to look something up, then that ought to be ok. It’s about getting the problem solved and if they need to use their resourcefulness or contacts or tools to solve the problem then so be it.

It’s quite an honour to think that someone else thought these posts were somehow “influential”.  I am unashamedly proud of my blog and it has certainly helped me shape my own thinking, but the idea that it might also somehow help others shape their thinking is always nice to hear…  I guess that’s one of the definitions of “influence”?

If you wanted to cast a vote my way, I wouldn’t knock it back.  🙂

There are, of course, many, many other worthwhile nominations in this years Edublog Awards.  Take the time to have a browse through them, vote for your favourites. and I’m sure you’ll uncover plenty of interesting ideas among them.

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Is Teaching a Dirty Word?

There is a cliche that ones hears a lot in education about the need for teachers to not be a “sage on the stage”, but rather a “guide on the side”.  The main idea behind these two cute terms is to denounce the role of a teacher as being a “sage”; the font of all knowledge in a classroom, someone who stands in front of the empty-headed students and tells them everything they need to know.  We decry this idea of a sage, and quite rightly too.  In a post-Google world, the notion that anybody – including a teacher – could still be the source of all information and wisdom is pretty ridiculous.

Likewise, the other half of this expression implies that the more proper role of a teacher is that of being a “guide” for students.  Someone who goes along on the journey with students as a partner in learning.  As my good friend Tony Butler would say, it’s about creating a “big brother, little brother” relationship with students rather than a “master/apprentice” approach.

In the old-style classrooms of the 19th and 20th century, the emphasis was often placed on the teacher moreson than the students. Most industrial model classrooms are founded on the idea that they have a “sage” at the front of the room dispensing scarce knowledge.  The emphasis in these classrooms was strongly on the teacher and the act of teaching. Learning was assumed to have taken place because the teacher had performed the act of teaching… If we teach them, then surely they must have been learning, right?  I remember hearing a teacher once say, after his students performed extremely poorly in an exam, “I taught them but they just didn’t learn!”

Our 21st century paradigm of education moves students back into their rightful place at the center of the learning process, and we now talk a lot more about the importance of learning over teaching.  We think more about how students learn, and even the educational language we use emphasises learning as being far more central these days.  And this is all good and absolutely on the right track…

While I totally get what these two expressions are trying to say, I’m a bit concerned that as we strive to elevate the importance of learning, learners and the learning process, that we don’t swing too far the other way and somehow make teaching a dirty word.  One of the things that struck me as I wrote the book was just how frequently my volunteer proofreaders would pull me up on my use of the word “teaching” and replace it with the word “learning”.  And while I did agree with them some of the time, there were a few cases where I thought it was almost coming across as a sort of political correctness, replacing “teaching” with “learning” at every opportunity as though there was some inherent fault with the idea of teaching.

And it made me wonder, have we swung the pendulum too much away from teaching and towards learning?  In our eagerness to ensure our classrooms are constructivist, student-centered places, are we in danger of devaluing the act of teaching?

In a lot of the research I read, the critical factor for success of learners was the quality of the teaching.  In fact, when all the various factors are taken into account – class sizes, funding, type of school, level of technology and so on – the one factor that makes the biggest difference by far is the quality of the teaching that takes place.  Good teaching inevitably leads to good learning, academic success and overall student satisfaction.  Report after report comes to the same conclusion, citing the quality of teaching that takes place in a classroom as the major factor.

Perhaps this bias was amplified because I was writing about interactive whiteboards, a technology that is often accused of heralding a return to the “sage on the stage” days, and therefore a return to a more didactic form of classroom operation.  Certainly, I understand why people would say this, since the very nature of IWBs suggest a classroom where the focus of learning is at the front of the room – a place usually inhabited by the teacher not the student.  In practise I found that good teachers use IWBs to be more inclusive of their students’ needs, more flexible in differentiating for different learning styles and more creative in how they design and pace lessons, but I can certainly see how they could be used poorly by less skilled teachers.

But all of this got me thinking about the value of teaching.  The value of explicit instruction.  The value of a wise teacher directing the flow of learning in their classroom.  I think it’s something we all understand is a foundation for effective learning, but I wanted to question it so that we don’t automatically abandon the value of teaching as though it was somehow “damaged goods”.  If teaching – and the quality of it – really is the big factor in creating successful learning, should we be more willing to occasionally play “sage”?  Rather that abdicate the act of teaching, have 21st century classrooms simply redefined our idea of what it means to teach, causing us to reinvent a different kind of “sageness”?

So, where is the balancing line?  In your classroom, how do you find the right balance between providing explicit teaching instruction versus making your classroom a completely learner-centric environment?  If you had to describe it a newly-graduated teacher, how would you explain the best way to find this balance?  What does it look like?  How can you tell when it tips too far one way or the other?

CC Flickr Photo Credit: Teaching Math or Something
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foundphotoslj/466713478/

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When The Wings Fall Off

One gem of wisdom I’ve quoted a number of times on this blog is from a speech given by professor Seymour Papert, and it goes like this…

“The model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.”

What I really like about that quote is the idea that it’s not the specific content of what we teach that really matters, but rather the ability to apply general principles to solve entirely new problems.

So when I saw this video it occurred to me that it was an interesting example of how we can never be fully prepared for when the unexpected happens.

I know that the training required to be a pilot is an incredibly rigourous process.  It means learning about aerodynamics, weather, instrument training, plenty of takeoffs and landings and lots of instruction on how to deal with emergencies, but I’m not sure that it includes what to do if your wing falls off! (I don’t know, maybe it does… perhaps if you’re a pilot you can leave a comment and let me know)

So you’re flying along, relying on all those habits you developed back in flight school and the many years of practice you’ve done since then, and suddenly one of the wings comes off and all those things that have always worked for you no longer apply.  The plane plummets towards the ground.  Your mind immediately runs through all the stuff you learned in flight school to find the right response to this situation, but there isn’t one.  The controls no longer responds the way they used to.  The big question now is, can you unlearn what you’ve always known and relearn what you need right now? Can you apply the right general principles to this new situation and respond to this situation for which you were never trained?

I can’t even begin to fathom the composure that must have been required to put that aircraft into knife edge flight, start using the rudder as an elevator and vice versa, and manouvre the thing towards the ground in such a way that it stalls a few metres of the ground and then drop it safely onto the runway. But more importantly, the only way that such a stunt could even be attempted is by a pilot who was able to relearn and instantly adapt to the aircraft’s new behaviours.  To me, this is a perfect example of the sorts of things that Papert was talking about when he said, ” We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.”

PS: There is a bit of discussion in the comment thread on this video as to whether it was real or not… some say it was faked, some say not.  Lots of accusations of it being a model plane, being done with CGI, although some even said they were there and actually saw it happen. I did some more research and I’m still not convinced it’s fake. This video of a model plane suggests that such a manouvre is feasible.  Either way, the point remains that if it did actually happen, there is no way that a conventional response would have given the pilot a hope in hell.