Category: Kids and Learning

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He's doing well, thanks.

Ah, parent-teacher night. That wonderful night that comes around every so often where you get to meet all the parents of all the kids you really don’t need to see. You know, the kid who’s getting straight As, has an 85+ average, always does their homework, works well and contributes to everything, and their parents always turn up to the interview asking “So, how’s he doing?”

Of course the kids who are nearly failing the course, the ones with 15 absent days and who never handed in that last assessment task… how come the parents of those kids never seem to turn up? If I was a cynic I’d think there might be some sort of correlation between the two.

I’m sitting here at parent-teacher night right now. Alone. Next appointment not for another 25 minutes. I mean, I’m not a Math or English teacher. Fortunately I’m getting a wifi signal, so I thought I’d drop a quick blog post on here…

But what jumped out at me the most during the report writing process this week was the utter futility of the report card comments. The comment bank we had to work from was, well, less than stellar. Finding comments that were actually useful was really difficult and mostly the report comments that went out were so generic as to be almost useless. I found it very frustrating.

At the end of the day the only thing the kids (and their parents) were interested in was the grade – that percentage number. And I can’t seem to get my head around the significance of a number that really is not measured against any clearly defined criteria in any meaningful and consistent way. To set tests and assessment tasks that provides a score where anything below 50% is a failing mark just seems fairly silly to me. I could write a test that everyone could pass or I could write a test that nearly no one could pass. How does this vague and arbitrary 50% equate to a “pass”? How does my test in my school compare to another teacher giving a “similar” test in another school in the province? Or how does it compare to a score from a totally different subject. And yet the numbers that get generated from these tests and assessments are treated as SO critical, often making or breaking the student’s progress through the school system. Intuitively, the good kids will end up passing, and the slackers will probably end up failing, (whatever that really means) so perhaps common sense eventually prevails. But these grade numbers are taken so seriously! They provide a platform for progress through the system and on to university, and yet to me they just seem so arbitrary.

I heard a story the other day about a kid – a “good kid” – who had n 85+% grade and realised that because of the way the scores were averaged, and because he only needed 50% to “pass”, he could still pass the course without even sitting the final exam. So he turned up, wrote his name on the paper, submitted it and walked out. Did he pass the course? Yes. Do I think he achieved his potential? No way, not even close. Was the pass/fail system at least partially responsible for condoning this attitude? Unfortunately, yes.

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Window to the World

Even though I’m just outside Toronto, Canada, I just a fun little chat with a Year 7 class at a school in country Victoria, Australia.

Anne Baird is a teacher from this Victorian school. Anne and I have been exchanging a few emails and Skype calls recently to share some blog and wiki ideas. Anne noticed I was online and buzzed me to ask if I’d like to talk to her Year 7 kids. I said yes, and the rest was easy. From my place in Canada, she was able to have my voice and video image magically appear on the board in a little school in country Victoria, and then Ms Baird and her kids were able to chat to me about life in Canada.

We spoke for about 25 minutes, and the kids asked me a bunch of questions about Canada, what it was like, the weather, the food, the people, and so on. Then my daughter – who is in Year 6 here in Canada walked past the computer so I put her on for a chat. Kate told them about school here, what it was like to live in a different country and so on…

Here’s the thing about this… the time taken to organise this event was about 2 minutes. The cost to make it happen was zero. The effort of taking part required a single mouse click on the Accept button.

It made me wonder… why don’t we take more advantage of these technologies in schools? We so often want to expose kids to bigger ideas and to let them ask questions from people who are outside their own little world, and the technology to do this is right here, right now. The technical barrier to using this stuff is ridiculously low. It requires very little special technical skill or know-how, and is not difficult to set up, and costs virtually nothing. We really should be using it more than we do.

And why don’t we? Too often the barrier for real-time collaboriative tools is that school systems block such traffic from their networks. Administrators unthinkingly deny access to collaborative technologies like Skype, MSN, and so on, because they think that if the network enabled kids to talk with people outside the classroom it would be dangerous or distract them from the work they should be doing, so they just turn it off.

But the way I see it, the value of being able to connect to the outside world could be incredibly valuable if we just manage it the right way. Of course you probably can’t just give open Skype access to every kid, but in many school systems the one-size-fits-all approach to online security is so restrictive that it stops anyone, including many teachers, from using these powerful learning tools with their kids.

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Thoughts from Both Sides

Here’s a link to another fine post by Will Richardson from his Weblogg-ed blog. I feel the same frustrations that Will is talking about, and I think he raises some excellent thought-provoking points.

I find it interesting that Will’s post arrived in my feedreader at about the same time that I received this beautifully written post by one of my students on her class blog. I asked the kids to write me a short piece on the topic of Communication… I told them they could interpret that pretty much any way they liked, I was just interested to see what they might come up with. I was blown away when I read Michelle’s post. I’d encourage you to take a moment to read it, and please, if you can, leave her a comment.