Archive

• Bullying: Responding to a Sad Fact of Life

  September 19, 2011 3:45 AM Comments Off on Bullying: Responding to a Sad Fact of Life

  Bullying is a fact of life.  It has always been so and it always will be, because bullying is part of our human nature.  We see it in politics, in professional sport, in the movies and, not surprisingly, we also see it in schools – playgrounds, staff rooms and board meetings included.  Aggression and dominance are a part of our make-up; it can be managed, but not eliminated.

  That doesn’t mean, however, that we should accept it.  What it does mean is that suppression is not an adequate response and is doomed to fail.  Of course there has to be “zero tolerance” but the only constructive interpretation of this term is that we can never look away.  Responding to bullying with vengeance doesn’t get at the root of the problem and therefore does not resolve it.  It may push it away but it doesn’t eliminate it.  The “just say no” approach is both naive and irresponsible.

  There are much better ways to go.  You can set clear expectations for behaviour, you can provide adequate supervision, you can teach students how to respond if they encounter bullying, you can intervene decisively if it happens and you can use restorative justice to heal, for example, but by far the best approach is to build students’ resilience.

  Personal resilience is rooted in our own characteristics, of course, but also in the social environment that we construct for ourselves and others.  We might refer to this as our personal network, or our community, or the social capital in our society.  Schools have an important role to play in developing both students’ internal and external assets, but I want to comment particularly on the external assets – the social capital upon which students can draw.

  In “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam defines social capital as “a norm of generalized reciprocity: I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.”  Others might talk about Social Responsibility or the Golden Rule.  Whatever you call it, what matters is how we go about creating a society in which, when bullying occurs, there is immediate, supportive and constructive response from those who observe it – both for the victim and the perpetrator.

  Schools are not solely responsible for building social capital, but they have a very important role to play.  In fact, the creation of social capital is one of the main reasons for having a public school system.

  So how might schools go about this task?  Well, simply bringing the whole community together is a very good, indeed essential, start.  But then, of course, schools have to operate in ways that exemplify and inculcate the values they espouse.  If they operate on the basis of “might makes right” authority in which adults claim inherent dominion over children  – for their own good, of course – they are not doing that.  What students learn from such an experience is quite likely the opposite of what we would hope and what they require in order to forge a civil society in the diverse and dynamic realities of the modern world.

  Therefore, as part of a pro-active response to the fact of bullying and and for the greater good of society, social capital development  should be high on the priority list for twenty-first century transformation.  This “hidden curriculum”  needs to come out of the closet and take its place beside human capital development in the discourse about school quality.  Without this rebalancing of educational goals, all the focus on individual academic achievements and technological prowess may be for nought.

• It’s Not Time For Imagination?

  September 14, 2011 4:05 PM Comments Off on It’s Not Time For Imagination?

  “But daddy, it’s not time for imagination!” My four year old son, Luke, was doing his best to rescue a toy that his two year old brother, Liam, had been playing with. The problem was that, according to Luke, his brother was not using the toy for its intended purpose and should, therefore, be required to give it up. I had tried to explain to Luke that Liam was using his imagination and had come up with a different way of playing. Needless to say, my reasoning didn’t wash—at least not with Luke.

  In a recently posted CEA video, John Ralston Saul has some rather poignant things to say about what we sacrifice when our school systems are focused on efficiency, managerialism and content over form. And while authentic intelligence is held up by Ralston Saul as being one of the victims of the rather utilitarian model of education that has been taken shape around us, I would argue that imagination has suffered as well.

  And, you know, it makes total sense.

  Think back to the opening conversations that you’ve had in your schools and district offices this year. Have they been more focused on strategies for increasing test scores, or on ways of creating engaging and exciting learning environments for students? Have they been more concerned with mitigating risk through policy statements and rules, or with ways of encouraging entrepreneurship and intellectual risk-taking? Have they been more centered on assessment and evaluation, or on fostering real and powerful learning in our students and teachers?

  More and more the priorities and values that are promoted in our public schools push to the side the types of energy and thinking that are going to make real differences in the ability of public education to prepare students for dynamic citizenship in the 21^st century. More and more, we’re saying to our students and our teachers, “It’s not time for imagination.”

  Imagination and creativity cannot simply be inserted into our school systems as a “value-added” feature. It’s not about developing a curriculum that teaches imagination, and its certainly not about creating a box on the report card that accounts for imaginative thinking.

  No, imagination must become part of the culture of the way we look at schools and the work of education in Canada. It needs to be infused into the discourse used by policy-makers, administrators, teachers and students. Public will and resolve can open up the space for a shift in the types of conversations that are considered valuable in our 21^st century schools. Imagination can help us to keep those spaces open!

  Have you encountered a shift towards thinking of schools from a more imaginative perspective? In what areas of school practice do you see room for the infusion of imaginative thinking? What could imaginative thinking look like in your school context?

• Hockey Riots and Public Education

  September 8, 2011 6:40 PM Comments Off on Hockey Riots and Public Education

  The special report into the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots concluded that, “No plausible number of police could have prevented trouble igniting in the kind of congestion we saw on Vancouver streets that night.” In fact, policing can never create such harmony. It is an essential tool, but it is not the root source of the peace and order that we all desire. Civil society rests on what sociologists call the “social capital” in our culture; that is, “the information, trust and norms of reciprocity inhering in one’s social networks.” (Putnam, 2000) Without this foundation, no amount of authority or force can either create or preserve peaceful coexistence.

  Social capital is created when all elements of society meet, share common experiences and learn to live with and respect each other, thus establishing norms of inclusiveness and reciprocity. Where it exists, social capital acts like a civic immune system, responding to protect the “body politic” from the anti-social behaviour of individuals and groups within it. With high social capital the need for policing decreases and when it is used it is more effective because the public actively support it. Without social capital no amount of force can impose order on a society.

  In “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam explains that, “Networks of community engagement foster sturdy norms of reciprocity … [Sometimes] reciprocity is specific: I’ll do this for you if you do that for me. Even more valuable, however, is a norm of generalized reciprocity: I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road … Trustworthiness lubricates social life. Frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity.”

  We hear a lot about the duty of schools to increase the life chances of students by building their personal skills. Clearly this is important, but it is equally important that schools foster the sort of civil society in which students experience the “peace, order and good government” that our constitution envisages. Schools provide not only private good for individuals but also public good for society as a whole.

  This was one of the fundamental reasons for the creation of public schools. “In1829 at the founding of a community school in the bustling whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Thomas Greene eloquently expressed this crucial insight: We come from all the divisions, ranks and classes of society … to teach and to be taught in our turn. While we mingle together in these pursuits, we shall learn to know each other more intimately; we shall remove many of the prejudices which ignorance or partial acquaintance with each other had fostered … In the parties and sects into which we are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of him whom we do not in so many respects regard as brother … We may return to our homes and firesides [from the school] with kindlier feelings toward one another, because we have learned to know one another better.” (quoted in Putnam, 2000)

  Assessment of school performance focuses on “human capital” (i.e., accomplished students) but seldom considers “social capital” (i.e., socially responsible citizens). The latter purpose deserves more attention. Schools cannot prevent hockey riots, but unless they do their job in building social capital, it is certain that in a diverse and dynamic world such tragedies will be more common and more severe.

   

  Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

• Prevent Teacher ‘YouTubing’ by Giving Students More Freedom to Learn

  August 25, 2011 4:21 PM Comments Off on Prevent Teacher ‘YouTubing’ by Giving Students More Freedom to Learn

  I cringe when I hear the horror stories from other teachers about how their board has banned cellphones, Facebook and YouTube.  If privacy in a public classroom is the sacrifice that we have to make in order to get the educational benefit out of these devices with video capability, then by all means do it.  Students need to be taught that the polite, respectful thing to do would be to ask for permission to videotape your teacher and then respect his/her wishes.  It is far better to take these moments where cell phones conflict with lesson plans and teach how to better use these devices properly.

  The key is reculturing ourselves to accept this technology in more ways for learning.  If you’ve ever wanted to text someone during a meeting, or Google something at the dinner table to fact-check, then you’ve got a taste of what’s happening in classrooms worldwide today.   Devices that connect to the internet come in all shapes and sizes and there is no way that the public school boards can attempt a 1:1 ratio of equipment to student.  So we depend on students to bring their own tech. If a smartphone (or tablet or laptop) allows students to have that kind of access, then I’m all for it.  Students are capable of deciding how they can use technology to improve their learning, and school needs to provide the environment to help them be productive.  Instead of eliminating their technology from the classroom, we need to teach students the consequences for texting or being on Facebook. They’ll miss out on opportunities for learning, if they can’t learn to communicate well.  Giving students, parents and the whole school community multiple ways to communicate will benefit everyone.  This year my new Grade 9 library helper emailed me and ‘cc’ed’ her parents so that they could sync her library schedule with her parents’ Outlook calendar.  Open communication with the broader community of learners that pertain to my school is my goal.

  The dilemma of society learning when and how to use technology is not in saying “No” to students. The answer lies in the best teaching method in the world: give the students more choice.

  The dilemma of society learning when and how to use technology is not in saying “No” to students. The answer lies in the best teaching method in the world: give the students more choice.  We need to let students Tweet to each other about their geography lesson to deepen their learning, if that’s their choice.  We need to let them choose how they will publish, and determine their own privacy settings.  We need to teach them how.  To eliminate technology from the classroom is to deny our students access to the three most important concepts they’ll ever learn: communication, collaboration and creation.  It prevents them from moving forward and it prevents the greater community from moving forward with them.

   

  Photo courtesy of Dean Shareski http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/3268690032/

• Are You Twittering?

  July 5, 2011 8:16 PM Comments Off on Are You Twittering?

  I am new to Twitter. I’m also new to motherhood. The Twitter thing developed as a result of me sitting down and feeding my baby multiple times a day.  Now when I breastfeed (purists my gasp in disapproval) I alternate between looking lovingly at my baby and curiously at my computer screen.

  I’m writing to all you educators who haven’t yet tweeted. Reluctance held me back for a long time and I don’t want you to miss out on what I had been missing out on simply because you are plagued by the same misconceptions I was before I became a Tweeter. Allow me to clarify:

  1. Other than my Masters degree, Twitter might be the best pro-d I have ever had. When you use Tweetdeck or something similar like Hootsuite (which I have not yet checked out) you can get tweets from anyone as long as they are discussing something that interests you (more on Tweetdeck below). This feature means that you can glean morsels of wisdom from anyone in the world who cares to share their thinking with the Twitter world. And the great thing is that A LOT of smart people tweet their smart thoughts on a regular basis. People tweet links to studies, articles, ideas, blogs posts, lesson plans, slideshows, and how-to plans.
  2. If it weren’t for Twitter I wouldn’t know about flipped classrooms, Alfie Kohn’s “Beyond Discipline”, an education technology conference that took place and which I was then able to attend remotely, ideas for infographics lessons, LiveBinder, a Cleaner YouTube, and digital portfolio possibilities.
  3. Twitter discussions get deep. On any given night you can bet that people are getting together at an arranged time to Tweet on a certain topic. Within my first week of using Twitter, I participated in a Twitter chat with British Columbia’s Minister of Education George Abbott and joined a weekly professional book club chat. I held some skepticism about just how much I could get out of a conversation that flows like a river in 140 character length bursts, but it proved to be an enlightening experience. The character limit forces people to be concise – a welcome difference from many face-to-face discussions where participants sometimes communicate their passion with verbosity.
  4. If I ask a question, I get a lot of answers – almost immediately. The Education Twitter community is generous with its thinking and knowledge. I’ve also found it one of the least judgmental places to seek out understanding. People of all levels and experience are online so the adage holds firm: no question is a stupid question.
  5. I don’t have to be chained to my computer to find value in Twitter. Some teachers believe, as I did, that I’d have to spend too much time online, staring at a computer screen and forsaking my “real” life in order to participate. Not true. I can log in to Tweetdeck for five minutes and learn something of interest and value that provokes my thinking. 

  If anything I’ve mentioned above sounds even remotely intriguing to you, get on Twitter and find out for yourself. And if you have any questions, Tweet me at @bmooreintheloop. I’d love to hear from you.

  PS: Tweetdeck is like an organizer for tweets. It organizes people’s tweets in columns. You can have all tweets on a certain topic come in one column and all tweets on another topic come under another column. For example, I have a column that gets all tweets about education and another column that gets all tweets about teaching English. Topics are organized around hashtags. The hashtag for the education tweets is #edchat and the hashtag for the English tweets is #engchat. See? If someone I am not “following” adds one of those hashtags to their message, I’ll get it in its column. Tweetdeck has made Twitter’s process make sense to me.

• School’s Out For The Summer. What A Silly Thing To Do!

  July 2, 2011 4:42 PM Comments Off on School’s Out For The Summer. What A Silly Thing To Do!

  Finally, summer has arrived.  School’s out and we can all frolic for 9 long weeks, by which time the euphoria of the moment will have faded and everyone will be quite excited to get back to school.  In the meantime students will forget a great deal and the productive habits and behaviours honed over the school year will have faded so that September will be devoted to getting back into the flow.  With what is often a drift through June, that makes for 17 weeks of lost learning, or one-third of the school year.

  In addition to the lost opportunity for all students, research shows that over the summer the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students grows so that increased inequity must be added to the negative side of the ledger.

  And why do we do this?  Simply because its a habit.  If there ever was a good reason, it is long forgotten and now irrelevant.  So, why not change it?

  How about shaving three weeks off the summer, which still leaves a healthy six weeks for foreign travel and lazy days at the cottage for those who can afford it, and adding this time onto mid-year breaks, perhaps one week to the winter break and two weeks to the spring break?  This would allow for three semesters, with three-week breaks after the fall and winter semesters, and six weeks after the spring semester.

  Evening out the year would enable more continuous learning, alleviate the downside of an excessively long summer and provide mid-year breaks that are actually long enough to be restorative.  The extended spring holiday in particular would undoubtedly benefit both students and teachers by breaking up the exhausting run from January to June.  Perhaps that and the slightly shortened summer would also reduce the inclination to coast through June and add productive learning time without extending the school year.

  Of course one could also divide up the year with three four-week breaks but the 3-3-6 pattern is less dramatic in its impact on all the established patterns of behaviour in families and communities.

  I am hard pressed to think of a logical reason that this would not be a better approach than what we do now.  It seems to be only inertia and lack of political will that stands in the way of a simple change that would be better for everyone.

  What do you think?

  
  

• Playing to Learn

  June 17, 2011 4:20 PM Comments Off on Playing to Learn

  A review of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, 2011. ISBN-13: 978-1456458881

  Play is neither trivial nor frivolous; it is how we learn. Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown take seriously the role of play as a mindset that needs to be cultivated in education. In A New Culture of Learning, they invite us to see how a world in constant flux is not either a problem to solve or a challenge to overcome. Via richly textured stories about what learning and play look and feel like in digitally connected participatory cultures, the authors invite readers to imagine how teaching might respond to a world in constant change.

  In a skillful analysis of shifting learning contexts and cultures, the authors explore learning as a cultural, social, and continuous process of inquiry, engagement, and participation in the world around us. Given that knowledge and information are dynamic and changing, that current technologies are participatory and emergent, they argue that learning environments must be transformed into knowledge building collectives that constantly create and respond to change.

  They explore the power, nature, and benefits of learning collectives that shift away from a culture of solitary professionals and experts to worldwide webs of professionals and amateurs working together in knowledge building groups – groups like those highlighted in the book, Seeing in the Dark, a collaboration of amateur and professional astronomers interested in astrophysics theories, or like fan fiction collectives, which illustrate how interest-driven inquiry is about how people learn in addition to what they learn.  Harry Potter fans join an online community engaged in ongoing conversations to connect with like-minded enthusiasts and experts. Through contributions to wikis, blogs, and online forums, readers change the culture by participating in it. Readers learn the stories via the books and explore the meaning of the novels through active engagement with others online in rich, participatory cultural contexts.

  Thomas and Seely Brown’s key ideas about new learning cultures converge in a case study of a massive, multiplayer online game. In World of Warcraft, groups of players form guilds, go on raids, battle monsters, and progress through increasingly difficult challenges. A raid is a complex group action that can involve 25 globally dispersed players in six-to-eight hours of game play.  The authors invite us to imagine the ways in which players develop and hone dispositions and character traits – embracing change, understanding the power of diversity, using feedback for constant improvement, and living on the edge – valued competencies and attitudes needed for a world in constant change.

  A New Culture of Learning is an important book that disrupts notions of schooling built on stable knowledge and individual learning. In constantly changing contexts, where new ideas are exploding, learning has to be continuous, connected, and collective. Play becomes a strategy for cultivating our imaginations, engaging our creativity, and embracing change, not something to “grow out of”. As the world grows more complicated, complex, and fluid, our opportunities for imagination, innovation, and play increase.

  In technology-enabled learning environments, teaching can be transformed in ways that recognize learner participation and engagement in networked conversations as fundamental to knowledge building. In new learning cultures, teachers design learning environments to cultivate creativity and the imagination, offer flexible boundaries, and support learners in undertaking meaningful, challenging, and collaborative tasks – playing with rich resources and making collective contributions to their culture.  Evaluating the collective act of knowledge building involves a shift of focus from the individual effort to the quality of the product.  Reminiscent of Seymour Papert’s ideas about hard fun, the authors argue that when students feel passion for a topic, they will seek out the tough problems, work hard to solve them, and have fun doing it.  Participatory learning environments sustain student motivation and engagement in powerful ideas and in questions about things that matter to the learners and to the world.

  Thomas and Seely Brown’s book will appeal to prospective and practicing teachers, school leaders, graduate students, post-secondary teachers, and leaders who need to understand how complex learning happens beyond school in order to design participatory learning environments. The authors’ examples of beyond-school learning, from blogging, to multiplayer online games, to Wikipedia, serve to illustrate the new, fluid culture of learning.

  The authors call for a balance between the structure that educational systems provide and the freedom to play in new participatory and connected cultures. Education should be a place where we embrace the many online resources and rich opportunities for play, exploration, and cultivating the imagination, not attempt to shut them out.

  Readers can access the book’s online community for reviews, videos, and additional resources at  www.newcultureoflearning.com

• A Modest Proposal – Podcast Newsletters

  June 11, 2011 10:36 PM Comments Off on A Modest Proposal – Podcast Newsletters

  Podcasting has become so simple that I think its time for it to replace the good old newsletter.  This was first suggested to me, and is demonstrated weekly, by Kurtis Hewson, an elementary principal in Claresholm, Alberta.

  Every Sunday, Kurtis makes a few notes and then sits down in front of his computer for 10 minutes and simply narrates the events of the week that has past and what is upcoming in the week ahead.  Then, with a couple of clicks the video is posted to the school web site, where parents know they can go for the weekly news.  Its simple, its engaging, its far less work than a newsletter, its green and it never gets lost on the way home.

  This idea could be easily adapted by Classroom Teachers, Coaches, Superintendents, Trustees and others for their communications.

  So what are the caveats?  There are lots of “problems” one can think of, but problems are not reasons to stand still.  Hands up everyone who thinks printed newsletters are an elegant and effective communication device.  I don’t see many hands!  Of course not.  Newsletters are just a habit, and habits are hard to change because we gloss over the problems in the familiar present and get fixated on imagined challenges in the unfamiliar future.

  Not everyone can get onto the internet at home.  What to do?  Set up a terminal in the library and invite parents to use it when they drop the kids off?  Does the public library have such an access point?  Burn a few DVDs that can be borrowed from the office?  I’m not that creative, but I am certain that others who want to solve this problem could do so – or at least they could find a response that ‘satisfices’ as much as current practice.

  They say that public speaking is one of most people’s greatest fears so will principals be brave enough to go on the internet for all to see – forever.  Not much to say here, except “get over it.”  You can’t hide forever.  Once you try this you’ll love it.

  Of course, some things may not fit in this format.  Some print or graphic notices would can be put on the web site in the same area as the podcast.  And perhaps parents do need to post some papers on the fridge with schedules or phone numbers or some such durable information for which they prefer not going to the school web site.  If so, send home a notice – and then mention it in your podcast.  I’ll bet you don’t have to do that more than a couple of times a year.

  This is an entirely practical idea that could be very much more effective than newsletters.  But you know what be even better?  Get the kids to do it!  That would not only get us dipping our toe into the technological pool and thus gaining skills and confidence that can migrate into the classroom, but it would also be a way to start letting go of hegemonic adult control – and that’s an equally important part of the change that is required for 21st Century Learning.

• A Modest Proposal – Let’s Flip the Class

  June 5, 2011 9:45 PM Comments Off on A Modest Proposal – Let’s Flip the Class

  In his June 5th Blog, Larry Cuban comments: “Lecturing is performing, a way of conveying knowledge in a fresh way, a way of bridging oral tradition and visual culture that teachers, professors, and so many others have continually adapted to new media … With all of the concern for student-centered inquiry and using tougher questions based upon Bloom’s Taxonomy, one enduring function of schooling is to transfer academic knowledge and skills (both technical and social) to the next generation. Social beliefs in transmitting knowledge as a primary purpose of schooling remain strong and abiding . So lecturing and questioning will around for many more centuries.”

  Perhaps this is true, but it still leaves open the question of how the “lecture” portion of instruction is provided.  One promising practice is to “flip the class.”  This phenomenon seems to have originated with the Khan Academy, but it does note merely mimic that limited – some say flawed – approach and takes several forms.

  For example, a teacher (or a department or a district or a province) can present the lecture portion of a course – in whole or in part – as a series of podcasts and require students to view the lecture outside of class as their “homework.”  The individual activity that students would traditionally have done at home then becomes a class-based tutorial in which students work together in groups to complete the assignment while the teacher circulates to assist as necessary and perhaps to interject with a brief comment to the class if a common misconception or difficulty emerges.

  This is a good example of using digital innovations to create more personal contact time between student and teacher as well as creating cooperative learning time.  For students, it eliminates that sinking feeling that comes when one starts the homework and  suddenly realizes it does not make sense.  That’s when the phone lines heat up.  Wouldn’t it be better to make this discovery in class when there is a friend or teacher immediately available to talk about it.  For teachers, it eliminates the hours spent outside of class with students who come in desperately seeking help (and who then probably do their Chemistry homework surreptitiously in French or while they gulp down their lunch).

  There is also an additional task for the teacher, which is creating the podcast.  However, this is now technically trivial so anyone can do it with ease and it is a task that could be shared with other teachers of the same subject, each taking their favourite topic and perfecting their lecture on it.  There is no need for it to be a polished production with multiple takes and so on.  After all, lectures aren’t.  Students just want the goods, not another music video.  And once a podcast is “in the can” there is no need to change it unless some improvement can be made.

  The lectures themselves can be posted to a Youtube or Vimeo channel so that students can view them, and review them as often as necessary, at a time convenient to them.

  It would be foolish to suggest that video lectures are sufficient as instruction or that they replace teachers, but that does not mean that we cannot do them in a better way.  Flipping the class has been shown to have many benefits and its one more way for teachers to merge onto the high-tech highway.

• A Modest Proposal – Online Requirement for Graduation

  May 26, 2011 3:42 PM Comments Off on A Modest Proposal – Online Requirement for Graduation

  Online courses and pro-d programs have expanded rapidly and will continue to do so.  The ability to learn in an online environment will be an important life skill in the foreseeable future, and arguably is already.  So, why don’t we make completion of at least one such course part of every student’s graduation program?

  OK, let’s just skip the “yabbuts” for now.  That’s always an easy response/excuse, but these are problems to be solved not reasons to stall.  If this is a good idea, let’s do it.  But what makes it a good idea?

  The benefit for students seems clear to me.  Assuming a good quality course, which I will address in a moment, the experience of learning online in a supportive environment is good preparation for a world in which this will be increasingly common and expected in all careers, and also important for personal fulfillment.

  There are also benefits for the school system and for teachers.  This policy would be a lever that would force change in the system as it addressed the need for instructors capable of providing the course, providing access for students who require it and whatever policy and technical issues that are lagging and in need of update to support this change.  For individual teachers, it provides an opportunity to develop understanding and comfort in the online environment that is inexorably bearing down upon them.  School systems would need to provide support for this learning, the benefits of which would extend beyond the particular course to the more general need to incorporate new technologies into instruction.

  Imagine that a particular course in the graduation years were to be converted to online only provision.  In British Columbia, for example, it might be the Planning 10 course, which is intended to “enable students to develop the skills they need to become self-directed individuals who set goals, make thoughtful decisions, and take responsibility for pursuing their goals throughout life.”  Rather than just point students at a web site and wish them luck, the course could be organized as a hybrid; that is, face-to-face meeting with students from time to time (more at first and less later in the course) and the balance of the learning activities conducted asynchronously by students individually or in groups on their own time.  This would enable teachers to provide supportive scaffolding as students learned to be increasingly self-disciplined and self-regulating.  For those students who wish or require it, computer access could be available through the school library or computer lab.

  The school system would have to establish an appropriate hardware and software environment, and also provide support for teachers in learning to employ it.  Teachers would need to accept responsibility for this learning and thus for increasing their proficiency in the online environment.  Reluctance to accept this challenge is understandable, but, I would suggest, no longer acceptable for either school systems or teachers.

  The first attempts at such instruction might be somewhat primitive imitations of traditional instruction.  It takes time to learn to exploit the potential of the technology but every journey begins with a single step, and this one is over due.  There is no advantage to further delay.

  There are also many organizational issues to resolve.  Should students be required to be in a classroom during the scheduled time for this course even if its not a face-to-face day?  Do students have to be in school at all during at such times?  How will computer access be organized for those who require it?  Teachers for this course will need to have their own computer for planning and for student interaction.  Will they then be expected to respond to student inquiries outside of traditional instructional hours?  Should they establish email contact with students?  What about Twitter or Facebook?

  Yes, there are lots of questions and they are perfectly valid ones, but these are the questions that must be resolved for schools to move ahead with instructional use of technology and it is no longer acceptable to use them as an excuse not to do so.  The time has come to stop cutting bait and start fishing.

  
  

• Rethinking School Design: Part Two

  May 23, 2011 11:39 AM Comments Off on Rethinking School Design: Part Two

  If I were to walk in through the front doors of your school, what message would I receive? Would I feel welcome there? Would I be encouraged to stay for a while, or would I be more inclined to complete my business and get the heck out? Would I be able to get a sense of the vision and purpose of the school?

  In my last entry, I started to do some thinking out loud about architectural design and, in particular, how values, vision and purpose can be expressed and affected by the physicality of this place we call school.

  For many educators, the physical design of their schools are a given, inherited and already determined. Often the only opportunity to change design features is through a retrofit or renovation process.

  But let’s start doing a little blue-sky thinking and imagine that, as a parent, a teacher, an administrator or a community member, you were invited to be part of the planning team for a brand new school in your district. What design aspects would be important to you? What architectural features would help to reflect your school’s values and vision?

  And let’s begin by making a grand entrance!

  Entrances are powerful places, possessing the ability to communicate so much about what goes on beyond the threshold. But I would also argue that what goes on in the rest of the building can be greatly affected by the design of the entrance.

  One of the “mantras” that I use to remind me of the vision for my own dream school is, “Let’s turn this school inside out”. This involves the idea of drawing the outside community into the life and work of the local school, and allowing students to engage in more frequent learning activities out in the community.

  So how could that vision be reflected in my school’s entrance?  One idea would be to dedicate electronic display space in the front foyer. A photo and video feed displaying recent school trips to local businesses, facilities and learning centres would help to underscore the importance of that connection to the immediate neighbourhood and wider community. The multimedia pieces would be student-designed and part of the curriculum-based follow-up to each excursion.

  Another design related to this same inside-out principle would be an established and jointly sponsored studio area, along one side of the foyer. Studio spaces for dance, drama and visual arts would allow local artists to “take up residence” in the school, have a place to work, and act as an on-site resource for teachers, students and the rest of the community.

  Another learning principle that should be reflected in my school’s entrance involves a commitment to the environment. An indoor garden area is a simple and sustainable project idea that could involve students, teachers and the local community.

  Important to both the life of the garden and to the sense of openness that I wish to inspire in my school is a substantial amount of natural light. Ground level window space might be impractical and pose some threats to security, but skylight and overhead window spaces would do the trick!

  A couple of final design features that would help to establish an inviting atmosphere.

  First, comfortable furniture! Nothing says, “Come in and stay awhile,” more than soft, comfortable furniture arranged in ways that invite dialogue and conversation. Coffee tables with copies of the latest school and parent council newsletters, as well as student-produced books and magazines would help to communicate what is happening in the school.

  Finally, background music can go along way to offering a subtle invitational quality to any open space. I’m not talking about loud or intrusive music, but something that complements the atmosphere created by other design elements. 

   

  Entrances represent more than a way to get to other spaces in a building. They are a type of calling-card for visitors and a reminder to residents and employees of what it means to be in that space. I’ve been to many schools where it is obvious that time and thought have gone into the design of the entrance space. I’ve also been to others, however, where the entrance is rather dull and uninviting. 

  But entrances can also help to inspire and influence the life of what goes on in the rest of the building. By making design elements interactive, dynamic and open to the input of students and teachers as well community members, it is quite possible that curriculum activity within classrooms will change to take advantage of the opportunities provided. 

  So, now it’s your turn. Tell us about the grand entrances that you’ve seen in some of the schools that you’ve visited. Perhaps your own school has a particularly engaging design feature. Or maybe you would just like to join me in some blue-sky thinking about the school of your dreams. 

  As always, I look forward to your input! 

• Education Media/Blogosphere Roundup

  May 20, 2011 3:26 PM Comments Off on Education Media/Blogosphere Roundup

  There were a lot of education-related stories in the media this week covering a wide range of issues, from curriculum reform to cellphones in the classroom to the extinction of school librarians, and homophobia in the hallways.  Get caught up on what’s happening by clicking through the stories during this nice long weekend.  

  What news are we missing? Please e-mail me at mcooke@cea-ace.ca or better yet, use the comment box to suggest additional articles happening in your neck of the woods so that others can check it out.  

  Curriculum reform results not positive so far – Montreal Gazette

  Discrimination in the hallways – Slurs a daily school occurrence: report – Winnipeg Free Press

  Librarians fight for a role in a digital world – Globe and Mail

  Black Students to get roadmap to success – Halifax Chronicle Herald

  Battle over exemption from Quebec religious course reaches Supreme Court – Montreal Gazette

  Toronto school board lifts cellphone ban – Toronto Star

  University students fare better with interactive learning, study finds – Globe and Mail

  EDU-BLOGOSPHERE HIGHLIGHTS

  A Discussion With Education Minister George Abbott  – The Wejr Board (Chris Wejr)
  A few weeks ago, a teacher whom I have come to know very well and whom I highly respect, David Wees, sent me a message on Twitter that he had an exciting opportunity to share.  The following day, we caught up on the phone and he asked me if I would like to help moderate a discussion on Twitter with the Education Minister George Abbott!  What a fantastic opportunity for people to engage Mr. Abbott in dialogue around education in British Columbia.  I want to thank David for this opportunity and encourage all you to follow along on June 13th at 4:00pm PST on Twitter (hashtag #bced).

  The special momentum of the status quo – Joe Bower
  Have you ever noticed how little schooling has changed since your parents or even grandparents’ classroom days? I’ve often wondered how a classroom in 1985 Communist Russia would differ from one in 2011 Canada or America. Oh sure, there would be nuances with what kids were learning, but I fear how they were expected to do so would look freakishly similar. Regardless of time, place and political affiliation, behavioral conformity, worksheet completion and pre-test memorization would be the name of both games.

  Kids Are Learning…Just Not in Ways We Want Them To – User Generated Education
  Kids are learning . . . just not in the ways expected of them through formal education.  Young people have always engaged in informal learning based on their interests and passions.  Kids have found and initiated these opportunities in the past through school clubs, reading, local community centers, and neighborhood kids’ ballgames and performances.  These informal learning opportunities have taken an astronomical metaphorical leap due to social networking and ease of access of interest-based information via online means.  I am that not sure if those involved in the institutionalized education of young people are unaware or choose to ignore that young people are often learning more outside of the school than within that learning environment.

  So…What do you do for a living? The Clever Sheep (Rodd Lucier)
  For me, the most apt time for me to use a short, engaging presentation, is in introducing myself. Whether meeting educators for the first time, or striking up a conversation with fellow golfers on the tee block, I’d prefer to pitch myself as something more than ‘teacher’. I just don’t appreciate the baggage that sometimes comes with the job title, especially when I’m not sure about the other person’s past scholastic experience. Maybe that’s why my most recent name badge listed my job title as ‘Education Change Agent’.

   

   

• Necessary Disruption (Part 7: Making the Change)

  May 19, 2011 5:06 PM Comments Off on Necessary Disruption (Part 7: Making the Change)

  21st Century Learning that animates the 3 R’s through the soft skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking requires us to tackle the difficult challenges of removing curricular bloat, deepening learning through inquiry and refocussing time and attention from summative evaluation to formative assessment.  What will it take to make this happen?  Is it inevitable, impossible or conditional?

  There is always lots of change in schools but traditional behaviours are amazingly durable and, in the end, schools seem, for the most part, much more similar than different over the 56 years since I entered Kindergarten.  Perhaps the biggest change I have seen is greater inclusion of students with exceptional needs, but this change has been more of an addition to schools’ services than a change in their fundamental nature – and even in this case inclusion in secondary schools has been seriously hampered and limited by traditionalism.  The transition to 21st Century Learning is even more radical than inclusion.  It involves not only new services but different behaviours, not only refinements but also substantive changes,not only incremental improvement to the way things are done but also entirely new ways of doing them.

  In addition, these fundamental changes must occur relatively rapidly to avoid weakening of the public education system by private schools and for-profit institutions that move more decisively to restructure their services for the new era.  We could be easily left behind in this transition – sort of the Nokia of public service if you will.

  Frances Westley, J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation at the University of Waterloo, suggests in her interview with CEA on the landing page for this site that schools are inherently conservative because experimentation is dangerous and “we followed all the rules” is the best defense when you are being held accountable for many things over which you have no control.  Perhaps that’s why innovation usually occurs in isolated pockets and seldom spreads throughout the school system.

  Disruptive innovation that seeks to install a new pattern rather than merely enhance an existing pattern cannot succeed through grassroots enthusiasm alone.  Mind you, like all innovation it cannot succeed without it either, but bottom-up energy is not sufficient.  It also takes top-down initiative to create an environment that is hospitable to the innovation in the first place and, when innovation proves to be effective, it takes top-down intervention to recognize, enable and promote the innovation if there is to be broad adoption.  School systems have generally been inconsistent on the first count and failed outright on the second.

  This may be due in part to Ms. Westley’s observation, but I think it also the result of a flawed understanding of Professional Autonomy.  Teachers actively defend their right to decide how to provide instruction and assessment in their classes, as they should.  This autonomy is the flip side of their responsibility to do whatever it takes to enable the learners in their charge to succeed.  Without Professional Autonomy schools cannot be responsive to the needs of learners and Canadian students would never have achieved such impressive world-class results.  That, however, does not mean that there is no place for systemic expectations, and even insistence, on occasion, that individual teachers change their pedagogy to include necessary innovation and to be compatible with system-wide changes.  This may mean something simple like doing away with textbooks, or something slightly more complex like providing a web page for students and parents, or something quite fundamental like “flipping the class” to provide instruction on-line and tutorial assistance in class.

  When there is a demonstrable need and a proven response, it is ethically and professionally irresponsible to ignore it.  I do not mean to suggest the existence of a silver bullet – there are no such panaceas in education – but it seems clear to me – as argued in the six previous blogs in this series – that there is a need for change and that there are clear examples of successful responses that have been demonstrated in pockets of innovation around the world.  Isolated excellence, however, will not do in this case.  Effective practice needs to become the common practice.

  Therefore, I believe that the innovators cannot be left to convince their colleagues on their own.  Systemic forces must also be applied in order for disruptive change to occur.  These include provincial, district and school-level actions to enable change (for example, by addressing curriculum bloat and regressive assessment practices), to insist on teacher participation in change (for example, by deeply embedding assessment for learning in every teacher’s practice) and to support teachers in making the change (for example, by supporting professional learning with time and resources).

  Perhaps I am wrong.  Perhaps, as Peter Hennessy says in his blog, “school reform is seriously underway and,like termites in the woodwork, cannot be easily stopped,” but I doubt it.  The change has clearly begun and it has momentum, but whether it will spread far enough, fast enough and deep enough is conditional.  Perhaps it won’t stop but it may drift rather than surge ahead as it should.  The forces of preservation run deep in all organizations and certainly in school systems.  I fear that they are set to once again buffer, isolate and minimize the forces of innovation.  Good, as Jim Collins tells us, is the enemy of great and complacency is its faithful sidekick.  Can the moral commitment to maximizing the life chances of our students and the courage to step outside our comfort zone defeat them?  We’ll see.

• Rethinking School Design

  May 9, 2011 9:40 AM Comments Off on Rethinking School Design

  The transformation of the space we call school to the place we call school is neither innocuous nor unintentional. Instead, each time a new school facility is planned, built and furnished, it is infused with a set of values, expectations, assumptions about children, about teachers, and about the way that the relationship between the two should develop.

  To be sure, new school buildings stand in anticipation of the future, but they also carry with them the practices and traditions of the past—elements that are so ingrained in our thinking that they have become part of the DNA of the institution.

  When we talk about school change from the perspective of reform, the physicality of schools is not really an issue. After all, much of today’s reform agenda is grounded in the idea that our current model of doing school is fundamentally sound. We just have to tighten up our approaches, batten down the hatches, and get back to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Major architectural revisions are not part of the reform blueprint.

  But if we want to talk about transformation—and I believe we do—then we need to be bringing our teachers, students and administrators to the planning table even before shovels go into the ground. The educational ideas that are part of transformational thinking need to inspire the conversation between architects and school officials. The schools that are newly built or renovated in this 21^st century need to speak unequivocally about the principles of learning to which we adhere.

  If differentiation and universal design for learning is being inscribed in our policy documents, then flexible space and multi-purpose areas need to be available. We can no longer expect that the traditional classroom can be the locus for these approaches.

  If we are holding up collegial collaboration as a leading indicator of school quality, then we need to rethink the predominant designs where individual cells (classrooms) empty onto fairly narrow hallways. Instead, common learning and meeting areas that invite conversation and sharing are needed.

  If we really believe that the schools can foster a love of learning in both children and adults, then our design cues might well be taken from other places in our community that have been forced to consider the needs of those that come to learn: art galleries, museums and science centers are all good examples of spaces that have been transformed into places of real, interactive learning.

  If we recognize the fact that play and leisure are wonderful opportunities for deep and valuable learning, then outside spaces and designated indoor places for this to easily and effectively occur are essential.

  And if we are really committed to the vision of schools as community hubs, then places for welcoming the community must be built in to the design. It is no longer acceptable that visiting parents are relegated to hallways and crowded foyers. Instead, multi-purpose resource rooms for waiting, for meeting and for interacting would provide a more invitational atmosphere to the vision.

  These are just a few of the ideas that have been swirling around in my mind of late. Many educators want to offer programs that are committed to and reflective of the type of interactive, investigative and engaging approaches to learning that inspires transformational thinking.  Unfortunately, much of this thinking is not supported by basic elements of physical design. To be sure, those committed to new approaches to learning have done their best to be flexible, spending many hours attempting to recreate space so that it becomes the place that reflects their values, but this is time consuming and sometimes a little daunting.

  I believe that a sense of place is created as soon as physical space is imbued with value, belief and a sense of purpose. In the case of schools, this takes place well before the end users have any real chance for input. In the case of most schools, the traditional principles and approaches that hold back the work of transformation are inscribed in nearly every aspect of their design.

  I believe that a conversation needs to be opened up around this transition from space to place, and it is a conversation that needs to occur between all with a stake in school-based education.  I would like to begin some of that conversation here by inviting you to share your stories, your resources, and your ideas about school design?

  Are you part of a school community that has had the opportunity to rethink the physical design of its learning space?

  Have you altered existing space to create a different type of place for learning?

  What are the aspects of current design that best support your beliefs and values about teaching and learning?

  Have you encountered any examples of creative and innovative school design—examples that have caused you to say, “Woah, I would love to live there?”

  I’ve included a few references here as a starting point for some shared thinking on this. Why not take a look and weigh in with some of your own?

  As always, I look forward to the conversation!

  Some initial resources

  Ethical School Design

  An Education Canada article by Ken Klassen on the planning and design of a new middle school in Steinbach, Manitoba.

  Design Share 

  A set of resources dedicated to the exploration of designing for the future of learning. In particular check out the Language of School Design Tab

  SchoolDesigns.com

  This site features that architectural details of some of the most innovative elementary, secondary and post-secondary designs in the United States. Each year exterior and interior design contests are held and featured in the annual architectural digest. Worth a look!

• Frances Westley: What’s Stopping Innovation in Education?

  April 20, 2011 2:09 PM Comments Off on Frances Westley: What’s Stopping Innovation in Education?

  Frances Westley, J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation, discusses innovation in education.

• Necessary Disruption (Part 6: Assessment and Evaluation)

  April 19, 2011 9:11 PM Comments Off on Necessary Disruption (Part 6: Assessment and Evaluation)

  21st Century Learning that animates the 3 R’s through the soft skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking requires us to tackle the difficult challenge of removing curricular bloat and deepening learning through inquiry – but that is not enough.  Traditional assessment and evaluation practices are also in need of an extreme makeover, which is the focus of this penultimate entry in the Necessary Disruption series.

  Evaluation is traditionally used only to assign grades for the purpose of reporting to parents and outside agencies.  This does nothing to improve learning or teaching.  Of course, students deserve to know where they stand in relation to curricular expectations, and it is perfectly reasonable for the public to ask for some reassurance that the school system is working, so evaluation has valid purposes, but supporting learning is not one of them.  Evaluation is an afterthought tacked onto the learning process rather than an integral and contributing element.  That is unfortunate, but what is more troubling is that in its current form evaluation can actually be harmful in two respects.

  For students, an exclusive diet of summative evaluation tends to focus their sense of accomplishment on the marks that others provide as surrogates for their learning rather than the learning itself, which discourages them from taking on difficult learning tasks and is therefore antithetical to attempts to engage them in inquiry.  This focus on the end product rather than the process through which it is achieved is akin to a company focussing on profits rather than the quality of the goods, services and business practices that result in the profit.  It directs attention to the wrong things while neglecting the core business.  There may be short-term results in some cases, but in the long run its a losing strategy that fails because it does not enhance learning.

  On the other hand, for the public, summative assessment is a reasonable way to provide a measure of accountability in one of the largest, and most expensive, arenas of government activity, but problems arise here also because of the breadth and complexity of the intended outcomes.  Simple, clear measures are understandably preferred and often they are provided despite the fact that they neither accurately nor completely represent either intended or achieved learning.  There is nothing inherently wrong with such measures – assuming they are based on the curriculum and are technically sound – but simple answers to complex questions often lead to false conclusions and misguided responses.

  Would one find it appropriate to rank order the parents in a neighbourhood according to their proficiency in child rearing?  Perhaps the average of a child’s percentile score on a social skills index, an athletic proficiency test and the GPA on the school report card would tell us who is the best parent in town.  I suspect that most people would find this suggestion ridiculously naive and quickly point out its fallacies and limitations, if not its dangers.

  And yet, the Fraser Institute is seen as credible when it does this for schools using an essentially meaningless statistical mishmash of a narrow range of outcomes.  This misleads both individual parents and the general public.  Another example – mercifully not practiced in Canada – is the use of standardized test results for high-stakes decision-making about school funding and teacher pay.  Standardized testing is not the villain here; it is the assumption that it can capture what is most important about learning and the misinterpretation and misuse of the results it provides.

  So, while valid and potentially useful, evaluation is problematic because of the way it is sometimes used.  However, summative evaluation is not really the important issue for 21st Century Learning so I will leave it there.  It is formative assessment that is essential and that’s what I want to talk about.  First, however, let’s be clear about the distinction.  Assessment is the gathering of evidence of student learning to help a teacher understand what a student knows, does not know, is beginning to know, thinks s/he knows but has actually misconstrued, wonders about, is interested in and so on.  Assessment data can be used in many ways.  One of them is to compare what has been learned to expectations or standards in order to judge its quantity and quality in relation to what the curriculum intends.  This second step is evaluation.

  The difference is far more than semantic since these two related processes have fundamentally different purposes.  Assessment is necessary to enable evaluation, but this is not its most powerful use.  What a teacher comes to understand about a student’s learning enables two much more important teaching functions.  The first is to give helpful,descriptive feedback to the student within a coaching relationship that provides acknowledgement, direction and encouragement.  The second is to determine what the teacher can do next to most effectively respond to the learning success, needs and interests of the student.  (This use of assessment to inform instruction and enhance learning is commonly referred to as assessment for learning, in contrast to assessment of learning, which is intended to provide data for summative judgments.)

  Assessment of learning should continue, although it could be accomplished without consuming as much time and attention as is currently the case, but assessment for learning is the more important function and its elevation is key to 21st Century Learning.  This, I hope, sounds logical, but it is also complex and requires significant change by teachers and school systems.  Some of the change involves teachers learning new procedures and developing new skills, but the really hard part is for teachers – and equally importantly, for parents – to surface long-held assumptions and change those that have locked us into an almost exclusive focus on summative evaluation.  Unlearning of habits is very difficult at the best of times.  In this arena, the change is additionally vexing because it raises fears for many adults about loss of rigour based on subconscious attachment to flimsy views of teaching as telling and learning as listening.

  Assessment for learning (AFL) must become an integral part of classroom life, but it need not take additional time.  Unlike summative evaluation, which occurs outside of instruction and thus robs time from it, formative evaluation is embedded in the learning.  Of course, this means that curriculum must be designed to incorporate it and that teachers must learn to do it, but AFL represents a change in practice rather than yet another addition.

  The observations that are made and the feedback provided deal with the content of the learning but also with the process, thus helping learners to become conscious of their styles, strengths, challenges, preferences and habits.  This self-awareness is necessary for developing metacognitive control over learning behaviour (aka self-regulation) and one of the essential foundations not only for maximizing achievement in school but also for lifelong learning.

  Unfortunately, other than in the primary grades, students generally get very little feedback.  What they get is marks.  These marks are “earned” through compliance, diligence and replicative performance.  They are not intended as a mirror that illuminates learning but as the“ just desserts” for students’ work that lets them know “where they stand.”  The entire ritual of reporting, and the accompanying ceremonies of recognition and reward, reinforce the idea that the purpose of schooling is for students to get good marks so that the adults can be happy and proud.  In this pseudo-economic exchange, the most grievous sin is error, and this sin is detected through evaluation, which makes students understandably nervous about a process that they have learned to see as hostile inquisition. 

  Assessment for learning, on the other hand, sees students as partners rather than subjects, even co-learners in many respects, and error as a natural part of the learning process that occurs when one ventures out into the personally unknown.  In this worldview, a teacher’s primary assessment task is not merely to assign and correct, but also to provide constructive feedback that enables and encourages.  It takes time for teachers who were themselves students in schools where the summative evaluation model reigned, and who may have re-enacted that model in their own classrooms with the most sincere and positive of intentions, to reconsider it.  How much harder is it for students to believe that the ground has truly shifted and that it is now safe for them to openly share their questions and uncertainties without fear that all will be noted and held against them in the star chamber of evaluation?

  In addition to being willing and able to receive feedback from a teacher, students need to learn to provide feedback to each other and to themselves.  Peer evaluation, enabled through supportive curriculum design and instruction in reasoned judgment, helps to develop critical faculties and lays the foundation for self-evaluation.  Empowering a student with the inclination and ability to self-assess, and thus to self-evaluate, is another essential step in developing the self-regulation that is required for lifelong learning.

  Thoughtfully and constructively conducted, formative assessment (i.e, AFL) also helps students to develop a realistic but positive sense of self-efficacy that increases internal motivation and self-awareness that enables them to maximize their abilities by working to their strengths, knowing how to compensate for their weaknesses and skillfully selecting strategies to help them persist when they encounter challenges.  Thus, AFL is a strength-based approach (Theory Y if you like) that stands in stark contrast to the prevailing focus on remediating deficiencies (which is much more Theory X).  Both Theory X and Theory Y have their place, but 21st Century Learning puts Theory Y squarely in the foreground.

  The shift from a primary focus on summative evaluation to an emphasis on embedded formative feedback is both complex and difficult, but also essential.  It is a fundamental part of the disruptive innovation that will be required in the transition to 21st Century Learning.  Therefore, it is important to think about how disruptive innovation occurs and what it will take for existing systems to engage in it – which is the subject of the seventh and final installment in this series of blogs.

• Self-Efficacy and Self-Control in the Teaching Profession

  April 9, 2011 1:20 AM Comments Off on Self-Efficacy and Self-Control in the Teaching Profession

  I’m not who you think I am, I’m not who I think I am, but I am who I think you think I am.

  We don’t have a teacher quality problem in this country. Canada is fortunate to be home to some of the most dedicated, energetic and highly educated professionals that you’re going to meet anywhere. Our faculties of education do an excellent job of preparing candidates to assume roles as thoughtful, reflective and well-trained professionals, nationally and internationally. Our teacher associations have a highly developed infrastructure dedicated to the ongoing development and support of their members.

  No, I think it’s safe to say that the teaching profession in this country is of high quality and has contributed a great deal to Canada’s standing as one of the finest education systems in the world.  

   It’s not a teacher quality problem that concerns me. Instead, I’m concerned these days about self-efficacy among our teachers.

   Psychologist Albert Bandura defines self-efficacy as a person’s belief that they can be successful in a particular situation. One’s level of self-efficacy will affect how they think about, and behave towards particular tasks.

   According to Bandura’s thinking, people with high self-efficacy will

  • see challenging problems as things to be explored and mastered
  • develop a deeper sense of interest in the activities related to a particular role
  • be more strongly committed to their interests and activities
  • recover more easily from setbacks and disappointments

  Although Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy is most often used to describe individual behaviour, I think that it also has some validity for talking about group and organizational behaviour as well.

  I would argue that one of the casualties of the accountability movement in education has been the self-efficacy of teachers, both individually and collectively. In order to legitimize the centralization of power and control over schools that has characterized and, in a sense, defined this movement, it has been necessary to substantially alter the educational discourse and related messaging about teachers.

  For the past 15 years or so, a constant stream of top down “school improvement” initiatives, data collection protocols, large-scale testing and teacher evaluation processes have been accompanied by the implicit message to professionals working at the school level: “You’re not really doing a good enough job. We’re going to have to fix that.”

  And attempt to “fix” it they have. As it currently stands, teachers in many Canadian jurisdictions are not only required to follow a very prescriptive, grade-based set of expectations, but the strategies and day-to-day processes that were once controlled at the school level, often by individual teachers, are now handed down from above as best practice ready for universal implementation.

  Now, while I don’t have any hard scientific evidence to prove it definitively, it is my sense that the shift that has occurred has had a huge impact on the way that teachers feel about themselves, talk about themselves, and carry out the work that they have been trained to do. And for many of my colleagues, this effect has been discouraging and more than a little demoralizing.

   I, for one, think that it’s time for a change. In my last entry, I mused about how difficult it would be to recapture a sense of professionalism once it had been stripped away. Unfortunately, professionalism is not like a light switch: it’s not something that can be turned on and off at will. It takes a long time to devalue it and it takes even longer to restore it.

  Yet, I firmly believe that true transformation in Canadian schools is only going to take place once we have begun the process of re-energizing and re-valuing our teaching profession. And I believe that one of the important effects of this process will be a greater sense of self-efficacy.

  As usual, I don’t pretend to have all of the answers as to how this might happen. I’m not even sure whether I have all the right questions yet. But there are three dimensions of my life as a professional teacher that I think might be a good starting point for conversation.

  First, a greater sense of freedom to make decisions about teaching strategies and approaches must be returned to the local school and classroom level. Classrooms and schools need to become a place of dynamic innovation and creativity. Educators at the grassroots level need to be invested with a sense of trust they are capable of planning and implementing programs that meet the needs of their particular students. They certainly need to know about the strategies and approaches that others have found to be successful, but they also need the freedom to adapt professional practice to local context. The language of the profession needs to be more steeped in the spirit of responsiveness than it is in the spirit of accountability. And that requires a type of on-the-ground flexibility and professional freedom.

   Second, responsibility for personal and large-scale professional development needs to be given back to the profession. For too long, a great deal of teacher development has been appropriated by centralized priorities and initiatives. This has served to drastically alter the way that teachers engage in professional learning and the way that they enter into collegial and collaborative relationships. Teachers need to be given the opportunity to learn about and master new and effective approaches to their work, but more of the impetus and initiative for this learning needs to come from within the profession, and not mandated from outside.

  Third, a two-way flow of knowledge and understanding about teaching and learning needs to be nurtured and supported. Instead of coming to teaching professionals with pre-developed ideas and initiatives, the process of curriculum and program development needs to be more dialogical in its approach. Teachers need to begin to see the insights and understandings that they develop as part of their practice as somehow contributing to the overall

  It’s an interesting time to be a teacher. On the one hand, our efforts and successes are celebrated on the world stage; on the other hand, the gradual de-professionalization  of teachers on the home front has left many feeling frustrated and unfulfilled.

  Call it a perfect storm. Call it a tipping point. Call it what you will, but I think that we’ve reached a point in the story of education in this country where its time to engage in some serious conversation about self-control, self-efficacy and the future of our work in this place we call school. 

  Much more to explore here, but I would be interested in knowing how you perceive the level of self-efficacy among your own teaching colleagues. Have you noticed a change in teacher’s beliefs about their abilities to do the work that they are being asked to do. If so, what is at the root of that change? Is self-efficacy something about which we really need to be concerned?

• Necessary Disruption (Part 5: Inquiry-Based Learning)

  April 1, 2011 11:15 PM Comments Off on Necessary Disruption (Part 5: Inquiry-Based Learning)

  In order to keep pace with the rapid, pervasive social and technological change all around them, schools need to modernize their curriculum, instruction and assessment practices while preserving the supportive relationships that will continue to be an essential foundation for student success.  In the last post I suggested the creation of 20% “white space” in the curriculum to create time for learning in depth.  In this post I will look at how instruction must change to exploit this potential and in my next post I will turn my attention to assessment.

  Traditional instruction is primarily telling and demonstrating.  We don’t like to say it quite so bluntly, but the truth is that most time in most classrooms is taken up by some form of reading, lecture or video followed by guided practice or a lab exercise in class with independent practice later at home.  Now there is nothing wrong with this approach at some times for some things.  In fact, a skillful lecture can be both instructive and inspiring, and when augmented by strategies such as those that Barry Bennett describes in Beyond Monet (e.g., academic controversy, mind mapping) direct instruction often leads to success on tests and the various rewards that ensue for students and teachers.  Moreover, students are used to this familiar pattern so they know how to get on with it and parents tend to recognize and trust it.

  There are, however, two problems with this style of instruction.  First, student engagement, and thus learning, tends to be confined to the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.  Second, the soft skills of communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity (aka 21st Century Skills) that are necessary to apply academic learning in real world contexts are addressed only tangentially, if at all.  Additionally, some students do not find this style supportive and experience frustration or failure because of the mismatch with their learning strengths.  Many more who are reasonably successful in academic terms are really only surviving and not truly thriving as we would like.  The increased demands of modern life for creative knowledge workers and critically competent citizens requires that schools do better for students.

  Increasing student engagement, deepening learning in content areas and broadening outcomes to include 21st Century Skills that transcend subject boundaries requires not merely refinements to traditional practice, but distinctly new practices – disruptive rather than incremental change, if you will.  Traditional practices of direct instruction need not be abandoned, however.  They will always have their place in the pedagogical repertoire, but they should be used selectively from amongst a broader pallet that includes critical, creative and collaborative inquiry.

  Inquiry requires questions – real questions – that are developmentally appropriate, related to the learning outcomes that the curriculum intends and both interesting and important within the student’s frame of reference.  Framing these questions in partnership with students and scaffolding the inquiry that results so as to place students in their zone of proximal development is an essential pedagogical skill for 21st Century Learning.  The approach is often termed “problem based learning” or “project based learning,” without any significant distinction as far as I can tell.  Personally, I prefer the former description of PBL because it emphasizes the grounding in real questions.  (Note that PBL not the same as ‘discovery learning,’ which is concerned with the initial development of understanding rather than deepening it through application.)

  The questions that students explore should provide an opportunity for them to use what they have learned previously and augment that with new public knowledge to which they have access and which they are developmentally able to understand.  This knowledge building exercise should be conducted in groups, which provides the benefits of complementary abilities and potential synergy as well as the opportunity to develop communication and collaboration skills.  Because students must identify relevant and reliable information, which they then use to create a response or solution, PBL requires both creative and critical thinking.  Finally, the project should result in an actual application of the solution developed to evaluate its effectiveness and/or presentation of group results to an authentic audience that can validate the work and provide useful feedback.  

  As important and powerful as such projects are, they cannot constitute the entire curriculum.  There are some things best learned through direct instruction.  However, the knowledge acquisition and skill development that students continue to require is lent greater authenticity and significance when it is understood by students to be a useful part of a larger inquiry that requires such knowledge and skill.

  It is fashionable to suggest that the use of technology itself will deepen engagement and thus understanding.  I do not believe that to be an automatic result, at least not beyond a short-lived Hawthorne effect.  The key to engagement is that students find the content interesting and important enough to warrant their time and energy.  The modern world is infused with technology and that technology is reshaping the way things are done in all aspects of life, so schools should also exploit its potential, but technology itself is only a vehicle.  It offers many exciting possibilities and innovative educators are demonstrating the potential of a technology-infused pedagogy in often dramatic ways, but technology grafted onto weak pedagogy will not result in improved learning and teaching.  High Tech High, for example, has made a name for itself as an exemplar of 21st Century Learning and makes extensive use of technology, but its design principles are focussed on learning, not the technology used to support it (see http://thurly.net/).

  More inquiry-based learning that extends and deepens learning through knowledge building and public application/presentation is essential to 21st Century Learning.  This is hardly a new idea – in fact, it sounds a lot like something Dewey might say – and it is far from unknown in schools already, but it has to move from familiar theory that is occasionally enacted, perhaps with an enriched class, to a central premise and practice in all schools and for all students.  Our ability to do so can be greatly enhanced by infusing inquiry-based pedagogy with the technological tools that are endemic in the world outside of school, but the heart of the issue for 21st Century Learning is not merely using technology but regularly engaging students with questions they can explore rather than only answers we want them to absorb.

• Necessary Disruption (Part 4: Less, But Deeper, Curriculum)

  March 27, 2011 4:50 PM Comments Off on Necessary Disruption (Part 4: Less, But Deeper, Curriculum)

  Schools must respond to the rapid, pervasive social and technological change all around them.  In doing so they must preserve the supportive relationships which are their most essential benefit.  Surface features of schooling such as curriculum, instruction and assessment, however, need to be transformed.  But how?

  Let’s start with curriculum, and specifically the high school curriculum.  It’s too broad and too thin.  It too easily becomes a superficial diet of info-bits that are required to pass tests that measure what is easiest to measure rather than what is most important.  In a rush to ensure that students know all the basic essentials in a world where knowledge is growing exponentially we have fallen into the trap of filling heads rather than changing minds.  This serves no one well.  Curriculum bloat needs to be reversed in order to free up the time required for deeper inquiry into big ideas so that students are enabled with understandings, skills and dispositions rather than encumbered by inert and decaying knowledge.

  Curriculum is also too fragmented into subjects.  This is a purely academic deceit that is not present in the “real world,” where issues are always multidisciplinary.  Subject divisions make life easier for curriculum writers, text book publishers and testers, but they make schooling less authentic, engaging and significant for students.  These divisions also obstruct the development of important life skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication that should be present as pervasive themes but are generally lost, or at best inconsistently addressed, because nobody sees them as their job.

  It seems to me that there is a fairly broad consensus that students would be better served if curriculum were deeper and more integrated, but much less willingness to make the change.  Policy makers seem reluctant to suggest that anything be removed from the curriculum and many teachers are so indoctrinated with, and comfortable within, a subject-specific view that they do not seize the opportunities that do exist for a more substantial inquiry-based approach to learning.  Sometimes, in fact, it is teachers themselves who are the most fervent defenders of the curricular status quo.

  Therefore, I would propose a two-pronged response to this problem.  Government should, with consultation but without undue delay, trim the curriculum to create some “white space,” perhaps about 20%.  Teachers should be challenged to use this opportunity to integrate and deepen learning and schools should be required to consult with and report to their community in this regard.  I don’t believe, as Michael Fullan says, that you can mandate what matters but you can articulate a worthy goal, create the potential and issue the challenge.

  Ideally, in addition to individual teachers making changes, secondary schools would then organize students in “academies” or “houses” consisting of one class group per grade in order to encourage integration by having two teachers work together to cover at least the English, Social Studies, Math and Science components of the curriculum for those students until at least the end of Grade 9.  These classes should stay together and work with the same core teachers for at least two years.  This would provide a much more natural transition from elementary and create the potential for extended inquiry and stronger relationships.

  To invigorate and accelerate these changes, teacher teams should, within the confines of the working day, be provided with time to co-plan, and, as part of their own commitment to professional growth, they should create personal learning networks (directly and virtually) on their own time.

  The experience of deeper inquiry will, I believe, inspire both students and teachers so inquiry-based learning that takes root in Junior Secondary will extend into senior grades even if the greater degree of specialization required at that level makes a similar cohort organization impractical – which, however, I believe should be kept as an open question.

  Government assessments, which some would eliminate but which I see as a reasonable expectation by the public and an inevitable feature of schooling in our time, should be amended to reflect these changes – narrowing but also deepening their focus.  (I will say more about assessment in a future blog but mention this aspect because it is an essential feature of the disruptive change I am proposing.)

  There are abundant individual examples of similar approaches that have been highly successful even without the enabling government action proposed.  Its time for this good practice to become the common practice, and the expected practice, in order to provide students with the integrated, inquiry-based learning they require to prepare them for the world as it is and as it is becoming.  I believe that it would serve both students and society better and that it would be more enriching, rewarding and sustainable for teachers as well – a virtuous circle of benefits.

• A Toolkit for Learning: Using Technology to Close the Gap

  March 24, 2011 8:53 PM Comments Off on A Toolkit for Learning: Using Technology to Close the Gap

  We Canadians can be proud of many things. Among them is the quality of the education we provide to our children. On international examinations, Canada regularly scores among the best countries in the industrialized world, implying that virtually all our youth must be leaving school well prepared for life in the Knowledge Age.

  No large system can ever be perfect and our education system is no different. It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that there are still youngsters leaving school early and children who, by the time of secondary school graduation, do not meet accepted standards for essential competencies including literacy, numeracy, and scientific reasoning.

  The State of Learning In Canada

  How well, then, is Canada really doing in terms of preparing our children? The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial international survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds, and the product of collaboration among participating countries and economies through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Approximately 470,000 students from 65 countries, making up close to 90 percent of the world economy, took part in PISA 2009. The average performance of Canadian students was in the upper quartile on the PISA measures of reading.[1] By itself, this result seems encouraging.

  Nevertheless the same report noted that about 10 percent of the Canadian students tested performed at or below Level 2, the baseline level “at which students begin to demonstrate the reading skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life.”[2] About 30 percent of Canadian students could not perform at Level 3, the level that involves comprehension and interpretation of moderately complex text. Such basic difficulties, played out across the nation, have a significant impact on the economic well-being of all Canadians. Statistics Canada estimates that a one percent increase in the Canadian literacy rate would drive a sustainable growth in Gross Domestic product of $18.4 billion annually.[3]

  In Canada, the school dropout rate has declined slightly over the last decade.[4] This is laudable but not a cause for complacency. Indeed in some areas of the country, there is cause for alarm. In my hometown of Montreal, citizens were shocked to learn that, among francophone males, the dropout rate was over 60 percent.[5] Think about the implications of that for a moment. School dropouts make up 43 percent of welfare recipients;[6] and it is well documented that adults without a high school diploma earn substantially less over their lifetimes than other Canadians.

  In a report on the state of learning in Canada, the Canadian Council on Learning elaborated on the importance of essential competencies and the challenges of dramatically improving our nation’s literacy skills.[7] These skills are particularly important in the increasingly multicultural, multilingual context of present-day Canadian classrooms. Furthermore, research has documented the importance of children developing solid literacy skills early and succeeding at school from the outset. Students who are not reading at grade level by Grade 3 are especially at risk of failure in a variety of subject areas. Instructional approaches need to focus on early prevention and continuous support rather than later remediation. Later remediation, no matter how extensive and costly – because it is initiated after years of student frustration and failure – cannot succeed as well as early intervention.

  It has never been the case that money alone solves problems unless it is invested in equal amounts in human and physical resources

  Improving the State of Learning in Canada

  It is clear what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and when it needs to be done. The last pieces of the puzzle are by whom and how. This is where the research, development, and dissemination activities my colleagues and I are engaged in at the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) come in.

  The CSLP is a provincially funded and internationally recognized research centre of excellence composed of academics, staff, and students from eight post-secondary institutions in Quebec and with administrative headquarters at Concordia University. The mission of the CSLP includes not only the generation of new knowledge about education through research but also the mobilization of knowledge in partnership with educational practitioners by collaborating around the tools, techniques, and strategies for effective teaching and learning. At the CSLP, we take seriously the concept of evidence-based practice as an important means to improve the teaching and learning of essential competencies, with literacy skills at the top of the list. Finally, we look towards the development of educational software as the means by which teachers might improve their instructional practices and students might acquire the essential competencies for learning throughout school and beyond.

  My colleagues and I have studied the state of e-learning in Canada and noted the strong provincial and federal interest in e-learning as a means to address educational challenges of all types and at all levels.[8] Yet we also know that there is neither uniform nor substantial evidence of the effectiveness of e-learning, especially without careful attention to the importance of pedagogical features in the design of educational software.

  In 2006, we cautioned that:

  In education, there is the mistaken view, repeated over the generations: 1) that technology represents a “magical solution” to the range of problems affecting schools and learners; and 2) that money for technology alone, thrown in large enough quantities at the problems of education, will affect the kinds of changes that are required to produce a well-informed, literate and numerate citizenry. It is probably true that the wide range of electronic technologies (including those that provide access to the Internet) that are now, and will remain available stand a better chance of affecting educational change than the technologies of film, television, learning machines, intelligent tutoring systems, etc. However, it has never been the case that money alone solves problems unless it is invested in equal amounts in human and physical resources….It is arguable that the education of Canadians would be better served by more emphasis on preparing and training practitioners to use technology effectively than rushing to adopt the “technology du jour”.[9]

  About a decade ago, my CSLP colleagues and I accepted the challenge of tackling the performance gaps in the development of schoolchildren’s essential competencies. We began by developing an early literacy tool, progressed to developing an electronic portfolio tool that teaches students self-regulation learning strategies, built the foundation for an inquiry tool that develops information literacy, and have now begun work on a numeracy tool. Design and development remain guided by several core principles. Each tool must:

  • be based on the best available theory and research;
  • require input from educators, pedagogical consultants, and IT professionals;
  • be engaging for teachers and students and technically easy to use;
  • use embedded pedagogical support;
  • be flexible and adaptable in different instructional contexts and for different learners;
  • be validated for learning and other outcomes using the best research designs; and
  • be available to the educational community without charge.

  At the same time, we also realized that training and follow-up in the use of these tools was essential if we hoped for wide-scale adoption and effective use.

  The Learning Toolkit

  Technology is not a magic elixir that can cure learning ills on application. There are no quick or effortless technological panaceas for learning, but educational technology can be a powerful tool when it is well designed, carefully validated, and properly implemented.

  At the CSLP, we have developed an initial set of state-of-the art knowledge tools as part of the Learning Toolkit (LTK), which promote the development of essential educational competencies, including literacy, numeracy, inquiry, and self-regulation.[10] They are powerful and flexible tools, each with a unique focus and strength, which both supplement and support classroom instruction. To see demonstration videos and to explore the tools please go to http://doe.concordia.ca/cslp/ under Knowledge Mobilization.

  ABRACADABRA, or ABRA, promotes the teaching and learning of English reading and writing skills among youngsters, especially those at risk of school failure. It consists of 32 instructional activities and 17 stories that combine to create hundreds of challenging and engaging tasks for learners at a broad range of difficulty levels. A French prototype of ABRA has recently been released, and instructional and assessment modules are continually being expanded and refined. ABRA has been the subject of numerous validation studies including a large-scale pan-Canadian randomized controlled trial.[11] ABRA has documented positive and substantial impacts on alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and writing.

  In ABRA, choices abound in terms of the story genre selected, the literacy sub-skill to be learned, and the difficulty level of an activity. These choices afford great flexibility to teachers and learners; the game-like interactive activities ensure a high degree of engagement, turning the hard work of learning how to read into an enjoyable time of learning success. Teachers may focus on whole-class instructional activities, small group work, or individual remedial or enrichment activities. They may elect to focus on contextualizing activities by emphasizing the ABRA stories first since there is no prescribed order for engaging in activities. See the screen capture to have a glimpse at ABRA’s engaging environment.

  ePEARL is a web-based, bilingual (French, English) electronic portfolio designed to scaffold and support student self-regulation – including planning, doing, and reflecting – as a key learning strategy for knowledge acquisition. It also serves as a multimedia container for student work, whether that work is text, audio, video, images, or some combination thereof.

  Its four levels of sophistication make ePEARL age-appropriate for students from early elementary school through post-secondary education. The subject of two longitudinal, pan-Canadian studies, ePEARL is the only electronic portfolio in the world that has documented learning gains as well as changes in students’ learning habits.[12]

  ePEARL features include personalizing the portfolio; setting general or task-specific goals; creating new work via a text editor and/or audio recorder or linking to work created elsewhere; reflecting on work; sharing work; obtaining feedback from teachers, peers and parents; evaluating personal motivation; editing work and saving revisions as a new version; and sending work to a presentation portfolio for archiving and exporting. ePEARL also contains a rich collection of video vignettes to assist students and teachers to understand and use both the tool and the self-regulated learning processes it is designed to strengthen. ePEARL is intended for use in all school subjects; we are currently trialing a version for use by The Royal Conservatory of Music as part of piano studio teaching.

  Inquiry Strategies for the Information Society in the Twenty-First Century (ISIS-21) is designed to develop lifelong inquiry skills by helping teachers, students, and librarians refine their abilities to undertake successfully the meaningful and critical exploration of important topics. The key phases of inquiry supported by ISIS-21 include developing and refining a guiding question; identifying evidence from a multiplicity of sources; evaluating the evidence for quality, credibility, and scope; and critically synthesizing the relevant, best quality evidence. The latest addition to ISIS-21 is an interactive game designed to help students learn more about the tool and the steps in the inquiry process. Teachers and their students in several schools in Quebec are piloting ISIS-21 for the completion of term-long projects during the winter 2011 term.

  MATHKNOW, a numeracy tool, is currently in the initial stages of design.

   All the tools are improved and expanded bi-annually. For example, future plans for ABRA include greater focus on second-language learners, older students, and adults who are experiencing reading difficulties.

  Finally, all the tools in The Learning Toolkit are in the service of research as well as application. They can and do help develop a deeper understanding of the processes and techniques they are designed to support.

  Scalability and sustainability

  We do not want the LTK to be our best-kept secret. My CSLP colleagues and I want to expand it, refine it, and make it much more widely used. Developing evidence-based software is only the beginning of improving the educational performance of Canadian youth. Working with teachers, administrators, and policymakers, we want to turn the fruits of our research and development into wide-scale practice. There is no cost in doing thia but great cost in not doing it.

  EN BREF – Le Centre d’études sur l’apprentissage et la performance (CEAP) est un centre montréalais d’excellence de la recherche qui se consacre à générer de nouvelles connaissances en éducation au moyen de la recherche et de la mobilisation de savoirs, en partenariat avec des praticiens en éducation qui collaborent relativement à des outils, des techniques et des stratégies visant l’efficacité de l’enseignement et de l’apprentissage. Malgré l’intérêt provincial et fédéral manifeste pour l’apprentissage électronique, il n’existe pas de preuves uniformes ou substantielles de son efficacité – en particulier sans que soit portée une attention étroite à l’importance des caractéristiques pédagogiques de l’élaboration des didacticiels. L’apprentissage ne comporte pas de panacées technologiques rapides ou faciles, mais la technologie d’éducation peut constituer un puissant outil lorsqu’elle est bien conçue, attentivement validée et bien instaurée. Les chercheurs du CEAP ont élaboré un premier ensemble d’outils cognitifs de pointe faisant partie de la boîte à outils de l’apprentissage, lequel privilégie l’acquisition de compétences essentielles, dont la littératie, la numératie, le questionnement et l’autocontrôle. Ces outils sont offerts sans frais pour compléter et appuyer l’enseignement en classe. 

  ---

  [1] Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, PISA 2009: Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World (Paris: OECD Publications, 2010).

  [2] Ibid., 13.

  [3] P. Bussière, F. Cartwright, T. Knighton, and T. Rogers, Measuring up: Canadian Results of the OECD PISA Study. The Performance of Canada’s Youth in Mathematics, Reading, Science and Problem Solving: 2003 First Findings for Canadians Aged 15 (No.81-590-XPE — No. 2, 2004). Retrieved from www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-590-x/81-590-x2004001-eng.pdf

  [4] J. Gilmore, Education Matters: Insights on Education, Learning and Training in Canada (Report No.81-004-X, 2010). Retrieved from www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-004-x/2010004/article/11339-eng.htm

  [5] B. Branswell, “Graduation Rates Stuck in Low 70s,” Montreal Gazette (2 Nov. 2010), p. 3.

  [6] Canadian Council on Learning, No “Drop” in the Bucket: The High Costs of Dropping Out. Lessons in Learning (2009). retrieved from www.ccl-cca.ca/CCL/Reports/LessonsInLearning/LinL20090204CostofDroppingout.html

  [7] Canadian Council on Learning. State of Learning in Canada: No Time for Complacency (2007). Retrieved from www.ccl-cca.ca/pdfs/SOLR/2007/NewSOLR_Report.pdf

  [8] P. C. Abrami, R. M. Bernard, A. Wade, R. F. Schmid, E. Borokhovski, R. Tamim, et al. “A Review of e-Learning in Canada: A Rough Sketch of the Evidence, Gaps and Promising Directions,” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 32, no. 3 (2006): 1-70.; R. M. Bernard, E. Borokhovski, E. Mills, P. C. Abrami, W. Wade, D. Pickup, et al., An Extended Systematic Review of Canadian Policy Documents on e-Learning (2000-2010). Final Report — SSHRC Presidential Grant on the Digital Economy. (Ottawa, ON: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2010).

  [9] P. C. Abrami, R. M. Bernard, A. Wade, R. F. Schmid, E. Borokhovski, R. Tamim, et al.

  [10] P. C. Abrami, R. S. Savage, G. Deleveaux, A. Wade, E. Meyer, and C. Lebel, “The Learning Toolkit: The Design, Development, Testing and Dissemination of Evidence-based Educational Software,” in Design and Implementation of Educational Games: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, eds. P. Zemliansky and D. M. Wilcox (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2010), 168-187.

  [11] R. Savage, P. C. Abrami, G. Hipps, and L. Deault, “A Randomized Control Trial Study of the ABRACADABRA Reading Intervention Program in Grade 1,” Journal of Educational Psychology 101(2009): 590-604.

  [12] E. Meyer, A. Wade, V. Pillay, E. Idan, and P. C. Abrami, “Using Electronic Portfolios to Foster Communication in K-12 Classrooms, in The Dynamic Classroom: Engaging Students in Higher Education, ed. C. Black (Madison, WI: Atwood Publishing, 2010), 125-133.

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