Category Archive

(Cross-posted at Think :: Learn :: Do) 

I hate paper.

Well, that’s a very strong statement, and probably not 100% true, but when I do start to hate it is when there is more around than what is really necessary.  When you consider how much paper goes through my pigeon hole in the staff room, the notes that leave the office, and the sheets that come across my desk, it’s a lot of paper.  If I don’t need to have it printed on paper, I’d rather have it some other way.  So there’s my problem.

Then I know there’s a problem many of us have at school.  The photocopier.  It’s a frustrating mechnical animal.  Especially the older machine that seems to have been deliberately engineered to cause trouble after the service contract has expired, what with all its jams and misfeeds.

There’s a simple solution to our problems.  Stop photocopying.

There may be some times when it’s useful or even necessary, but are there ways that are more efficient in terms of cost, time, eco-friendliness and learning benefit?

Holy Family at Luddenham is obviously asking a similar question, so when I saw that somewhere there was thinking what I was secretly thinking here (ok, the office staff would say my thinking was not so secret to them), I thought it might be good to blog about it to get it out of my system.

Just don’t expect me to produce and photocopy a survey for people to complete about the topic.  Yes, I can see the irony.  I might email you if I feel so inclined…

Photo credit: Day in the Life by zebble

The latest post by Dr. Scott McLeod on his blog Dangerousy Irrelevant questions what K-12 educators may be/are “secretly hoping” through a humourous little cartoon (I won’t re-post it here, because unlike Dr. McLeod, I don’t have permission; you’ll need to click on the link to see it).

Now obviously there isn’t a blanket answer here for all K-12 educators.  I’m also sure Scott McLeod is already well aware of some of the issues I’m going to take up here, but I’m going to do it anyway for the sake of being able to achieve some semblance of a train of thought this evening (my brain seems to have switched off).

For some teachers, sadly, there is a hope that the content they have always taught will be eternally relevant.  For others, there is a realisation that today’s content isn’t going to be the be-all-and-end-all for their students.  Those teachers can and do make amazing things happen in their classrooms.  I hope that sometimes, just sometimes, such glimmers of hope do shine momentarily out of my classroom windows.  Yet we also need to remember that such fantastic teachers are restricted and frustrated by systems, curriculums, governments and sometimes even school communities that simply haven’t made the realisation yet.

I also think I need to make a point that might make some teachers of long division, state capitals and cursive writing feel a little better.  Just because you teach these things doesn’t make you a bad, or even outdated teacher.  What you need to be concerned about is whether this content is the sole driving force of your teaching.  Any teacher who remembers their Educational Psychology from uni, particularly the work of Piaget, will remember schemas.  Yes people! The idea that new knowledge is constructed and understood through the addition to, extension, or even redefining or disproving of existing understandings (this is a very watered down explanation, I know).  So let’s not slam content completely.  There is content that children need to learn in school that they will need as the basis for developing further understanding throughout their lives.

On the other hand, anyone who thinks a person is going to get a job based on their abilities in long division and cursive handwriting, and their knowledge of captial cities, is not thinking all that realistically.  There is a certain amount of content that children need to learn in school (or perhaps they negotiate what they need to learn and construct their own understandings; perhaps a discussion for another time).  Perhaps the best way of seeing the content is that helps contextualise the learning of skills and values that I think the fabulous, innovative teachers are seeing as becoming increasingly important to develop within students.

Let’s take the long division as an example.  In the outcomes-based syllabuses of the state of New South Wales, the outcome connected with the learning of long division is this:

NS3.2 Selects and applies appropriate strategies for multiplication and division

Long division is only one part of that of course.  Yet it’s only when you go into the content that you see what the NSW Mathematics Syllabus demands.  Embedded within this are a whole range of skills, including:

• estimating
• selecting appropriate strategies (yes, long division is not always the best way)
• using operations in real-life situations
• checking answers in the original situation
• giving valid reasons for an answer, etc., etc.

These skills are all tied in with the five outcomes that make up the Working Mathematically strand of the syallabus.  It’s the embedding of these skills into the learning that make this syllabus a marked improvement on the old one (which was exceptional for its time).

So where am I going with all of this?  Well, the point I’m looking to make is this.  The shift needs to be away from a focus on learning content, and being satisfied we’ve achieved as teachers because our children know the content.  After all, new content is produced at an alarming rate; we cannot begin to imagine everything that our children will need to know when they leave school.  The shift needs to be towards learning essential content through the mastery of lifelong learning skills.  If children know how to learn, and value learning, then that is what will make them a valuable commodity in the labour market of the future, because they will be able to apply themselves to what needs to be done.

I can take my own experience as a rough example.  When I started school, there were no computers, so there definitely weren’t any Learning Technology Coordinators.  When computers were introduced, I learnt how to type, how to word process on the old Apple program Multiscribe, played Sim City, eventually used a PC once I got to uni, etc.  Yet once I actually became an LTC (after already teaching for a little while), none of the software I’d learnt as a child was going to help me - it wasn’t there.  My primary school wasn’t networked in 1989, we could only save our own data on magnetic disks… you get the picture.  A lot of what I do now has been learnt through getting a taste from someone, somewhere, perceiving that it’s something we need as a school (and consequently that I need to learn), and having an interest in playing around till I get the hang of it.  One of these days, we LTCs will have done ourselves out of a job, because using computers in classrooms will be as common as writing on a chalkboard, and I’ll be looking for the next thing I need to learn.

In a previous post, I mentioned our new Federal Government’s plan for an “Education Revolution”, which (among other things) made promises of increased technology hardware for school students and improved broadband Internet speeds across the country.

In fact, I remember finishing that post with “Of course, I could offer several far more revolutionary suggestions for education if the new government would like to hear them…”

Seems like Greg Whitby is thinking along the same lines I am on this matter.

He suggests in his post Revolution of the Mind that more hardware doesn’t go anywhere near far enough, and he’s right.  The government’s quoted desire for this “education revolution” is “to keep Australia prosperous beyond the mining boom.”  Fine.  Understand completely.  But how exactly will Australia remain prosperous beyond the mining boom?  Is it in skilling up Australian children in other trades?  Is it in simply ensuring that children can read, write, add and subtract?  Or is it in ensuring that today’s children have the skills and abilities to effectively respond to challenge and change so that they may remain constantly ready to work within occupations we haven’t even imagined yet?

What is the precise learning outcome that this revolution seeks to achieve?  Do we want to put computers in the hands of four grades of secondary students simply because we think it needs to be done?  What good will it do?  If we can answer that question, then we might be on track to making a difference.

Asking this question might also begin to see the ball rolling on a whole part of the education revolution that the government policy doesn’t seem to address.  Good educators already know that the hardware in itself doesn’t change learning, and doesn’t make a difference to learning results.  Australia’s schools need a revolution; one that begins in the minds and hearts of every teacher; one that is driven by a desire to see every student do their very best; one that challenges the students just as much as it challenges the system that governs their education.

Then, on top of that, all levels of educational leadership in this country, from the school level to federal government, need to provide the support to make this revolution happen.  For mine, the most important resource is not money, but rather the community’s faith in its professional educators to do their job well.

I like John Connell’s blog because he is someone who keeps me up-to-date with news from different parts of the world related to my line of work. Also, I get an occasional glimpse into happenings in Scotland, something I wouldn’t get otherwise.

Today I read in my feed reader just one example of John Connell’s blog keeping me informed. It was of an interesting set of survey results from the United States, which suggest that parents believe schools there do not prepare students for working in the modern world.

The results suggest that parents do believe there is a place for “basic skills”, but unfortunately (in their opinion), 21st Century skills necessary for competing in a contemporary global market are being neglected; to the detriment of students. I must say that I agree with them. Not in their assessment of the US Education System per se (overseas education systems are not my field of expertise), but their assessment of education and schooling in general at this time.

Of course, teachers and school administrators have their part to play in this.  Yet, behind this, there is also a political cloud that looms.  “Basic Skills” are apparently what the electorate want taught in schools.  Now, when the electorate has a conservative tendency (as is typical here in Australia, for example), that’s hardly surprising.  Yet, if all we’re going to teach are “basic skills”, then I can only imagine we’re preparing our children to work in a particular working world.  The problem is, the jobs they’ll be prepared for won’t exist here in Australia (or the US or UK for that matter), because as Thomas Friedman makes clear in The World is Flat, they’re far cheaper to do elsewhere.

Read the media release about the survey.  Make sure you scroll down to view the results summary and key messages in the .doc and .ppt files.

I told one of my students today that their book was at the front of the room.

“Where’s the front of the room?” was the immediate reply.

I had to say “Go and look near the board.”  Of course, I see the whiteboard as the front of my room.  But if that’s the front, then my computers and my desk are at the back, and the desks are all arragned in groups so you face one of the two sides of the room.  No one’s desk is actually positioned so they are facing “the front”.  Yesterday I spent most times I spoke to the children sitting at the bench on one of the “sides”.  The learning’s taking place all over the room, so I suppose there is less of a “front” to our learning space.  All in all, that’s got to be good.

The K12 Online Conference has started.  I downloaded the pre-conference keynote without any problems (maybe it was because us Australians have own daytime when many other participants are sleeping), and now, almost a week since said keynote was uploaded, am finally getting around to reflecting on it.

I’m pleased another Australian, Graham Wegner, alluded to the hype surrounding this keynote.  I was a little caught up in the hype myself.  Then I was a little scared that I might have been the only person watching it (during my holidays, even) thinking, “huh?  What’s the deal here?”  It’s not that David Warlick didn’t make some good points.  I did, however, have to watch it a second time and trudge through it, scrawling down notes as I went, in order to get the most out of it.

So what were key things that struck me that I had to write down?  Here are some:

• The borders that define education as we know it have turned soft… or they’ve turned transparent… or they’ve gone away altogether
• I was probably the last generation who could look at his father and see his future
• We are preparing our children for a future which we cannot clearly describe
• Our classrooms are flattening
• The best thing we can teach children today is how to teach themselves.

As I wrote these down, I really felt my own thoughts were being affirmed - especially about preparing children for unpredictable futures and teaching children how to teach themselves.  I’ve been engaging in discussions at our school for quite some time about teaching skills and that children need to know how to learn, because once they leave school, no one will do the learning for them.

Yet teaching children how to learn simply isn’t enough.  It has to be about teaching them how to learn within the world they live in.  It isn’t good enough (to borrow one image from Warlick) to show children how to gather the hard-copy data from the old encyclopedia.  Information today is far more overwhelming, multimodal, fluid and dynamic than the old set of books on the shelf.

This is where Warlick’s discussion around the digital native proves useful.  Don’t think for a second that the digital natives simply have new tools and, consequently, a new vocabulary that surrounds them.  These new tools have completely reshaped the world as we know it.  It is not a stable world.  The Viet Nam war was the first time many people have the theatre of war brought into their living rooms each night during the news.  Now the theatre of war appears on YouTube.  For Warlick, those who are the digital immigrants need to work on losing their accent.  I found a perfect example of the accent on a Facebook group for Australian Prime Ministerial candidate, Kevin Rudd:

Facebook is such a terrific vehicle for communicating with people and listening to what you have to say that I’ve decided to start a group to do just this. Please take this opportunity to contact my team and me by writing on this “wall.”  (emphasis added)

Take note, digital immigrants: the digital native would never have put the word wall in inverted commas; they are unnecessary for the digital native.  The wall is a common Facebook feature, and in facebook, everyone knows what you mean when you say wall.  We know that Kevin Rudd doesn’t want us to find a nice clean piece of masonry and graffiti it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not seeking to make a judgement on a politician one way or another, it was just a good example that I found on the net yesterday.  I don’t want to dampen his spirits, either - he’s making a good effort.  But we as teachers need to make an exceptional effort to ensure that our classrooms are the social, connected, networked places that the rest of the world is to these children.  I think David Warlick is right when he suggests that the future “haves” and “have nots” will be those who are connected and networked, and those who aren’t.

There’s more to this than comptuers and technical hardware.  There’s more to this than new classroom spaces.  What it requires is a complete reformation of the way we learn.  We truly and brutally need to ask and answer:

• Who is learning?

• What are they learning?

• When are they learning?

• Where are they learning?

• Why are they learning that?

• How are they learning?

Old strategy being used in answering a contemporary challenge.  If we’re serious about it as well, our answers will reach beyond the four walls of classroom and the hours of 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Tags: k12online07, k12online07pc

I did mention a podcast in my last post.  Finally, the first one from my students is up on the net!  Our factual recounts are now being produced in a new format and for a much wider audience.

The first podcast is (and those still coming will be) up on our class blog.

… and a hectic one at that!

1. Sorted out a mess that I should have tidied up yesterday afternoon, but was just too tired and over it.  Quick talk to a parent.  Take a phone call.
2. Started the day.  Prayer.
3. Religion lesson.  Have the great idea that we will storyboard Bible stories, illustrate key scenes in a graphics program, then add voice to tell in the story in something like iMovie or a Web 2.0 app (haven’t thought it all through yet).  Student tells me, “you always find something to do on the computer”.
4. Maths.  Assistant principal drops in while one group is learning about volume and capacity via the interactive whiteboard, and the rest are making lots of mess learning volume the “traditional” way (ie with buckets, measuring devices and several litres of water).
5. Recess.  Fix up the scanning of some pictures to support a student’s oral presentation.
6. English block.  Took a long time to settle (students, that is).  Literacy groups/menuboard first; principal drops in for two minutes to see things in action, gets talking with the students at the IWB.  Teachers aide supporting another group.  Move on to students giving their oral presentations.  Several students supported in their preparation by the teachers aides make their presentations to the class, to two very proud teachers aides (and so they should be), and the ESL teacher (whose students insisted that she must come and listen).  Assessment taking place as they speak.  Two very proud students visit the assistant principal and show him on his laptop how to access the class blog and listen to their podcast.
7. Lunch.  Sort out minor issue before going out to playground duty.
8. Silent Reading, followed by Visual Art.  Clean desks again, but this time wiping up paint rather than spilt water.
9. Students go home.  Staff meeting; break open the NSW/ACT Bishops’ Pastoral Letter, Catholic Schools at a Crossroads.
10. Look through data I’m collecting from staff on how they integrate technology into their teaching and learning as a basis for forward planning.  Spend some time on data entry and collation before heading home
11. Then, tonight, engage in some further professional learning (yes, reading and responding to blog posts is professional learning), scan over the online work from the children today, and post myself.

Tired.  Need to get some sleep.  But what a day!

Well, today I had some more success, despite the multiple interruptions to the usual classroom routine over the past seven days (a third of the day gone three times isn’t always easy to work through).

The simple task involved using the Activstudio software that came with our interactive whiteboard to drop shapes onto the flipchart pages and use the line tools to mark the lines of symmetry.  Some other features of the software also got tested by the students - the bucket fill was used on shapes and backgrounds.   I intended in a way to be a simple diagnostic assessment to see if children could already identify axes of symmetry and how much work would be needed, if any (the recent interruptions have meant there’s less time to properly address our learning in 2D space).

So one maths group got the task done, and quite well.  Yet the mind was still ticking.  “Let’s get this up on the blog”, I thought.  “There must be some kind of export function.”  Sure enough, I found I could export the flipcharts to flash.  A bit more fiddling (needed to get a host for the flash files as they won’t upload to learnerblogs), and we’ve embedded the students’ work into posts on our class blog (post 1, post 2).

So, what have we achieved today?

• We’ve integrated technology into our mathematics lesson
• My students have used our interactive whiteboard for learning
• We have work samples
• We’ve been able to assess what the children know about axes of symmetry
• Our parents can see what their children can do - simple reporting in less than 24 hours!

Now tomorrow, I’ll have to get some of the children to visit the principal to share their work with him and how they’ve used our new interactive whiteboard.  He’s just going to love it!

This afternoon, our staff broke off into their core learning teams (Religious Education, Literacy, Curriculum and Mathematics) to continue our work towards achieving our school strategic plan and our goals for 2007.  I have been working in the Curriculum team, and with another colleague, have been given the challenge of reviewing the school’s K-6 Scope and Continuum in Creative Arts.

So far, it’s been a slow process of reading the existing units and mapping out exactly what’s being covered, in order to identify gaps and overlapping in the learning, and work from there.

The discussion slowly turned towards the idea of the “Key Learning Tasks” that what bring the units of work to life in the classroom.  We reflected on what they were originally supposed to be; rich learning tasks that brought together skills and knowledge, employed higher-order thinking skills, provided an opportunity for all students at all levels to access the curriculum, were meaningful, directly linked to assessment and to stage outcomes, etc., etc.

Our professional critique was that some of the tasks described in the whole school program were richer than others.  Others sounded like they had great potential, but how they were described on paper just didn’t do justice to them - “you have to see it in action to fully understand…”

So, amongst all the learning agenda that our team needs the school to address, let alone the other dimensions of the learning agenda from the other teams, plus the competing agendas that impact on the work of teachers, where do we find the time and the strategies to re-evaluate the very basis of teaching and learning?

We need to ask ourselves:

• What is a rich learning task?
• What does it look like?
• How is it programmed?
• What demands should it make of students (and of teachers!)?
• How is it assessed?
• How is it resourced?
• How does it incorporate good strategies like cooperative learning, higher-order thinking/Bloom’s taxonomy/multiple intelligences/integral learning, use of technology, etc.?

Then, set this against the learning agenda outside influences (governments, etc.) wish schools to pursue, and the two can seem out of synch.  Just because the curriculum calls for children to learn about the British Colonisation of Australia in 1788 doesn’t mean we have to adopt 18th Century educational philosophies in order to teach it.

Unfortunately, it seems that the attempt to find answers only leads to more questions.  Yet, we press on…

OK, I’m catching up now: I’m really typing this on Thursday; not typing over the weekend and not getting around to posting until Thursday.

I didn’t get much work done after school this afternoon, and I don’t think I will most Thursdays for a while.  The Creative Arts Expo after school rehearsals have begun.  Like their previous incarnation in preparation for Wakakirri (in 2005), there’s an infectious buzz around them and through the school on those (increasingly colder) Thursday afternoons that’s hard to resist.  I’ve agreed to assist next week with preparing some old Wakakirri backdrops for a new life in our water-themed performance.

Walking around the school this afternoon soaking up the atmosphere left me thinking.   Why don’t we always have this buzz?  Why can’t Religious Education, English, Maths, and all the other KLAs gather so much interest?  Why is it that we’d never be able to get dozens of children to stay behind after school to do extra schoolwork?

We clearly have a big challenge as teachers around the whole issue of student engagement.  Not only do we owe it to children to provide such a stimulating learning environment, but we owe it to ourselves as well.  Disengaged students often become misbehaved students.  Unfortunately, though, it’s often easier to attribute blame to the student; “they don’t listen”, “they won’t give things a go”, etc., etc.  It’s easier to believe the problems lies with the students themselves rather than be confronted with the possibility of our teaching being a contributing factor.

Or at least we think it’s easier to apportion blame on the disengaged student.  I’d rather put the effort into reinvigorating my teaching than trying to manage (which is the best you can hope for in such situations) students who can’t see a point to what they’re doing.