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OPEN: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future By David Price
Comments Off on OPEN: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future By David PriceA review of OPEN: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future by David Price, Crux Publishing, 2013. ISBN: B00FLYFS98
In OPEN, David Price champions a revolution in education, intertwining social, economic, and environmental global events with the disruptive emerging technologies of the Internet and mobile devices, which are influencing, and being influenced by, a transformation in learning. With his conversational narrative style, replete with illustrations and examples, Price draws the reader in and makes complex ideas noteworthy and accessible. OPEN is the kind of book one can settle down with, in anticipation of an afternoon of interesting reading.
In discussing emerging trends, the first chapters of this book are disruptive and create a sense of an urgent need to radically reshape how we learn in our education and work institutions. Price optimistically urges readers to embrace the unavoidable change and be open to uncertain and emerging trends in learning. The concept of “open” is described as a set of actions and values that include sharing, trust, openness and freedom in democratized spaces that lead us to 21st century learning. In the final part of the book, Price challenges the reader to become engaged, to learn about learning, and to consider how the future of learning might differ from our current, more traditional, formal approaches to learning. He calls for a paradigm shift to make learning more innovative, effective, engaging and impactful. The book concludes with practical advice to the reader on how to move toward embracing and becoming open.
Price’s passionate conversational presentation of his analysis, while engaging and compelling, presents as somewhat conclusory despite the scant use of research on learning and technology. The rich use of examples and statements of fact would be more even compelling with additional references to help the reader research and reach the same conclusions. A deeper reflection of the complexity of the potential problems created by disruptive technologies would also add to his argument. Without these, the reader is challenged to assess the validity of the important arguments presented. Price acknowledges that we are in the uncharted territory of change; therefore taking action should also involve thoughtful direction for research to better understand and map the influential forces of disruptive technologies and discover additional contributing factors that will impact contemporary and future learning.
Photo: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, March 2014
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Building Community through Online Contact
Comments Off on Building Community through Online ContactAround the world, many children live and attend schools in environments that separate them from neighbours who are different in religion, race or ethnicity. They are living what British Prime Minister David Cameron has called “separate lives.”[1] In other places, children may be separated by distance or historical conflicts. Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to cross these boundaries with face-to-face contact, so innovative educators in many countries have turned to online learning programs as a way of bringing children from diverse communities together. In this article, we will look at some examples of projects that bring students together in this way in Ireland, the U.K., Europe, and Israel and we suggest ways in which the approach might work in Canada.
Community cohesion
In the United Kingdom at the turn of the century, concerns about ethnic strife that focused on immigrant communities, specifically race riots in Bradford, led to a study commonly called The Cantle Report.[2] In that report, the authors found that Britain’s children were living in socially isolated communities, in what some researchers called “isolated, parallel lives” and others referred to as a process of “enclivisation.” The issues seemed similar to those that led to the famous 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision[3] that concluded “separate is not equal” when it comes to schooling.
Concern about the impact of social divisions on school children is not limited to the U.K. and the U.S. Immigrants from former colonies face similar “parallel lives” across Europe, and there is religious and ethnic separation in Israel. There are tribal conflicts in Africa and ethnic divisions in Asian countries. We see similar phenomena in Canada in the “two solitudes” of French and English Canada, in the isolation of Aboriginal communities, and in efforts to deal effectively with the needs of new Canadians.
The idea behind “community cohesion,” then, is to find ways to build a sense of inclusion or belongingness in which individuals who differ in religion, ethnicity, or other ways identify themselves with a common set of social goals.[4]
Why use online learning to promote community cohesion?
It might seem that the logical way to bring communities together would be to have people meet face to face to work collaboratively on issues that would give them shared experiences and a basis for greater mutual understanding. This is the reasoning that led the U.S. Supreme Court to abolish segregated schools. It is also the heart of what social scientists call the “contact hypothesis” – a clearly elaborated and highly researched argument that says when people from different groups work together, there is a reduction in prejudice among members of those groups.
However, in Israel, teacher education researchers at the Mofet Institute have found that when cultural norms (and possibly safety concerns) demand separate schools for students of different religious and ethnic groups (as well as separation of the sexes in some cultures), both teachers and children can grow increasingly comfortable with cross-community communication in online environments that minimize the appearance of those differences.
On the island of Ireland, the Dissolving Boundaries Programme has accumulated over a decade of experience in bringing children from the Republic of Ireland together with children in Northern Ireland to work collaboratively online on curriculum questions.
We have found no examples of North American school projects that used online learning methods with the explicit objective of increasing community cohesion. In the U.S., the difficulty at present is that although many children attend racially and ethnically integrated schools, few are actually in classes with students who differ racially or ethnically from themselves.[5] If 60 years of bringing groups together in the same building has not resulted in increased social and academic contact, then it might well be time to try online communication that is designed to do just that. In Canada, the more pressing problem may be the great distances that separate many Aboriginal students from other Canadians, but once again, online communication could overcome the challenges posed by those distances.
In short, the focus of online communication is communication and the goal of community cohesion is to get people communicating with others who differ from themselves. We have the technology; why not give it a try?
International examples
Ireland’s Dissolving Boundaries Programme[6] began in 1999 as a collaboration between the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, in the Republic of Ireland, and the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. Ireland was divided in two by a 1921 treaty that sought to end centuries of conflict between Ireland and England. Throughout the 20th century, however, conflict continued until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This history of conflict has left a legacy of suspicion and distrust that continues to affect relations between the two parts of Ireland, and also between those in Northern Ireland who favour union with the Republic and those who prefer to maintain a closer connection with the U.K.
The Dissolving Boundaries Programme, importantly, was funded by the governments of both parts of Ireland. The project draws inspiration from the “contact hypothesis” and provides support for teachers who are willing to use technology to enable their students to work on common curriculum issues with students in the other part of Ireland. Currently, over 200 school-based projects involve hundreds of teachers and thousands of children who use online conference software, videos, and email to work together on teacher-developed activities that engage students in shared research, problem solving and writing in all curriculum areas. Face-to-face annual meetings are seen as an important motivational aspect of this program. Research and evaluations have consistently shown that the students enjoy the experience, that they feel they know more about students in the “other” community, and that they have more positive attitudes toward people who are different from themselves.
The eTwinning program[7] in Europe seeks to address a host of challenges involved in creating a political and economic union of people from a variety of cultures with different languages and a long history of conflict – including the two world wars in the 20th century. Additional challenges relate to the influx of people from former colonies and the further cultural and religious differences brought by immigrant workers. In 2005, the eTwinning program was created to promote the use of computer-based communication technologies to bring school children together in education projects that crossed national boundaries, with the intention of promoting mutual understanding and tolerance.It is telling that eTwinning changed its motto in 2008, from “school partnerships in Europe” to “the community for schools in Europe.” By July of 2012, there were 33 ministries of education participating in eTwinning and over 170,000 participants in more than 5,300 school-based projects. Assessments of the effects of the eTwinning program have largely been in the form of case studies and the perceptions of participants. In general, they indicate that participants believe the projects have increased technological skills, supported meaningful collaboration, and fostered improved understanding of other members of the European community.
Israel’s Mofet Institute also uses communications technologies to bring together children from the country’s ethnically and religiously diverse community. (Major religious groups are Jewish, Islamic, Christian and Druze; major ethnic groups are Jewish and Arabic.) The task is complicated by the diversity within these major religious and cultural groups. Since some of these groups require religiously separate education and some also require separate education by gender, many of Israel’s children attend schools with classmates who are very like them; however, there are also schools with a greater diversity in the student population. The divisions reflect the divisions in society, including housing patterns, and for many of Israel’s children there is little opportunity for face-to-face interaction with children from other Israeli communities.
Israeli researchers began their online work by bringing together teacher educators who were prepared to conduct online projects in the schools. The project leaders in the teacher education faculties have developed a variety of models of online educational interaction, including games that stimulate discussion of social issues. More recently, Israeli projects have engaged students in the use of social media to reach out across religious and ethnic barriers. Research based on interviews with teachers and students has generally showed that students begin the online class projects with concerns and reservations about communication with members of the “other” group, but that at the end, they report increased levels of trust and reduced levels of prejudice.
Challenges to community cohesion in Canada
How might such programs be of value in Canada? As noted earlier, many Aboriginal Canadians live in remote areas that impose a form of geographical isolation. We also have the French-English linguistic divide. Lastly, new Canadians often live in urban areas where school children may have contact with their own and other immigrant communities, but may not have much exposure to Canadian communities that were established long before their arrival. In each of these cases, in different ways, we believe that online school projects aimed at common curriculum objectives would contribute to a more cohesive Canada.
Canada has the technology to implement such programs and many of its teachers (and students) already have the necessary technological skills, so what is stopping us? One major challenge may be the issue of jurisdiction – education is a provincial responsibility so there are different curricula and no formal mechanism for national projects. Exacerbating this issue, Aboriginal education is a federal responsibility. However, if we look at the European Union, the national differences are even greater than our provincial differences. The E.U. put eTwinning into operation as a voluntary program built on individual teacher initiative, with professional development and small financial support as incentives. The Council of Ministers of Education of Canada is well situated to take a similar leadership role in building a comparable pan-Canadian program, and doing so would be a nation-building enterprise of considerable importance.
For this to work, we need to have faith in the ingenuity of Canadian teachers to find the curriculum matches that would make joint projects feasible. It may well be that such matches would prove to be easier than we might expect, given previous collaborative initiatives like the “Western protocol” and the use of a relatively common set of textbooks. Here, too, the example of the E.U. could be useful – the eTwinning website provides extensive guidance on how to find partner teachers and how to design and develop online learning projects.
Online schooling services in many provinces could also be a strong catalyst to moving quickly once an initiative has begun. As a bonus, such a program could provide the incentive for technological skill development in some teachers who have yet to find a reason to bring technology into their classrooms.
Language issues could, of course, be a sensitive point in developing Canadian online projects. While most eTwinning projects are conducted in English, the only language requirements of the program are that the teachers agree which language is to be used and the students have comparable levels of achievement in that language. In Canada we might want to encourage some bilingual projects in which learners use both official languages. Teachers working with Aboriginal students might see merit in projects that give their students opportunities to teach Native languages to other Canadian students. The key point is that the projects should encourage appreciation of linguistic diversity and support the learning of language skills.
Having examined the use of online learning to build community cohesion elsewhere in the world, we see a grand opportunity for Canada to not only learn from what has been done elsewhere, but also to develop a homegrown version that could be an important part of Canadian nation-building in the 21st century.
Illustration: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, March 2014
EN BREF – Les comparaisons internationales des résultats scolaires ont suscité beaucoup d’intérêt au cours des 20 dernières années. Ces comparaisons tendent à porter sur la littératie, la numératie et les habiletés de résolution de problèmes, en partie parce que l’Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques a ouvert la voie à l’élaboration de mesures fiables. Toutefois, dans de nombreux pays, les gouvernements reconnaissent que les écoles jouent un important rôle pour développer l’identité communautaire ou nationale – elles ont la responsabilité de rapprocher les gens. L’article porte sur quelques exemples internationaux de programmes scolaires élaborés pour développer la cohésion communautaire et demande aux enseignants canadiens d’établir quelles leçons peuvent être tirées de ces initiatives.
[1] D. Cameron, Speech on radicalisation and Islamic extremism (Feb. 5, 2011), reprinted by the NewStatesman.www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/02/terrorism-islam-ideology
[2] T. Cantle, Community Cohesion: A report of the independent review team (London: Home Office, 2001).http://resources.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/Publications/Documents/Document/DownloadDocumentsFile.aspx?recordId=96&file=PDFversion
[3] Brown v. Board of Education, United States Supreme Court, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=347&invol=483
[4] S. Muers, “What is community cohesion, and why is it important?” The Guardian (March 21, 2011).www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2011/mar/21/community-cohesion-definition-measuring
[5] G. Orfield, J. Kucsera, and G. Siegel-Hawley, E Pluribus . . . Separation: Deepening double segregation for more students, The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles, 2012). http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/mlk-national/e-pluribus…separation-deepening-double-segregation-for-more-students
[6] The Dissolving Boundaries Programme website is: www.dissolvingboundaries.org
[7] The eTwinning Programme website is: www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm
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Library to Learning Commons
Comments Off on Library to Learning CommonsI RECENTLY INHERITED my grandmother’s recipe box after she passed away. My grandmother spent much of her time in the kitchen creating delicious meals that drew our family together. As I examined her recipes for hot milk sponge cake, chicken pot pie, and others, it suddenly occurred to me that these very recipes probably contributed to my grandmother’s heart attack, and our family’s tendency toward heart disease. Most of them were created before nutritional research confirmed the negative effects of high levels of fat, salt and sugar on health. Although I uphold my grandmother’s adage that great food brings a family together, the kinds of food I feed my own family have changed. The way we eat has been transformed, and we are healthier for it.
Like great food, I have always loved school libraries. They are as important today as they have ever been; however, the recipes for a successful school library program have changed. Loertscher, Koechlin and Zwaan describe the contemporary school library as a learning commons, “the hub of the school, where exemplary learning and teaching are showcased, where professional development, teaching and learning experimentation and action research happen.”[1] Teacher-librarians, once primarily managers of school resources, can become instructional leaders, supporting and collaborating with every teacher in the school, promoting inquiry-based learning and fostering a thriving reading culture.
Our school libraries, at the physical and virtual heart of the school, are ideally positioned to lead and support educational transformation, provided that we are willing to consider new ways of working that better support our students and teachers. I invite your to consider the following recipes:
A recipe to foster student collaboration and personalized learning
I grew up in a time when the school librarian was monarch of his or her domain, daring anyone to upset the quiet order of the school library. These days, students have taken over. Flexible furnishings encourage students to sit together and chat about what they are reading or collaborate on an inquiry project. Many libraries host in-person and virtual book clubs, book talks and author visits. Students are now the ones creating book displays and book trailers to encourage each other to read. Students are encouraged to visit the school library learning commons to pursue topics of individual interest. Many school library learning commons incorporate performance spaces where students can “show what they know.”
One of the biggest challenges for contemporary teachers is meeting the needs of a diverse group of students that may include English language learners and students with learning disabilities and other special needs. The school librarian’s availability for co-teaching can help: As Fontichiaro and Buczynski point out, “Co-teaching halves the student-to-teacher ratio and facilitates greater levels of student support via feedback, conferencing, and personalized, differentiated instruction.”[2] The addition of iPads, iPods and eBooks to the library collection ensures that students have access to technologies that engage even reluctant and struggling readers. Add to that the possibility of students using the school library to conduct independent research, as a breakout space from their regular classroom, or as a place to attend book clubs, literature circles and other literacy-based programs, and we have a rich resource for meeting individual learning needs.
A recipe to promote inquiry-based learning
Many teacher-librarians are trained in inquiry-based learning. Because they are in the unique position of being able to work with all teachers and all students within the school, teacher-librarians are able to model and encourage best teaching practice, thereby improving the instructional capacity of the entire school. Alberta Learning, for example, proposes that “cooperative planning of an inquiry activity involves a teacher working with a teacher-librarian.”[3] Haycock goes on to suggest that “students learn more, and produce better research products, following planned, integrated information skills instruction by the teacher and teacher-librarian together.”[4] As my grandmother liked to remind me, “Two heads are better than one.”
A recipe to promote staff collaboration
Collaboration among teachers has been identified as one of the key ingredients for successful school improvement and increased teacher satisfaction. In fact, Zmuda and Harada go so far as to suggest, “Schools must eliminate the waste, turbulence and distractions caused by individuals working in isolation.”[5] The positive result of collaboration in schools is undeniable. Research confirms that “when school teams collaborate to clarify the relationship between design and the effect on achievement, we witness positive and constructive change at staff meetings, in classrooms, and in individual staff-development sessions.”[6]
In times of great change, it is evident that trust, relationships and respect are key components for school success. Haycock suggests that “the core of teacher-librarianship – collaboration and partnerships – rests on positive and productive relationships with colleagues and other staff.”[7] Teacher-librarians, embedded in the day-to-day life of the school community, are ideally positioned to collaborate with teachers and administrators in creating a recipe for success that is responsive to the unique needs of their school.
A recipe to steward valuable time and resources
Schools across this country are being asked to generate improved student outcomes, while at the same time facing unprecedented budget cuts. How can we make every penny count? The answer, once again, is to draw upon the expertise of a qualified teacher-librarian. Being aware of student reading levels and the curriculum being taught across grade levels, teacher-librarians can ensure that the school is purchasing resources that meet the needs of students without creating redundancies. By creating classroom library carts that can be rotated from classroom to classroom, teacher-librarians can ensure that library resources are getting into the hands of students, while reducing the cost of purchasing books for each individual classroom (books that students will eventually tire of). Teacher-librarians are knowledgeable about virtual resources and databases that can fill the inevitable gaps in the school library collection, and direct teachers and students alike to those that address their needs.
EDUCATION IS UNDERGOING unprecedented change. Faced with ever-tightening budgets, some jurisdictions have severely cut back on or eliminated school library services. Other jurisdictions have begun the library-to-learning commons shift by making cosmetic changes to their school library spaces. However, it should be apparent from these recipes that the library-to-learning commons transformation involves more than flexible furnishings and a new coat of paint. In fact, it is great staff, not great stuff, which is the hallmark of a thriving school library learning commons.
If you are fortunate enough to have a teacher-librarian on staff, I encourage you to try some of these recipes, taking advantage of the many benefits of planning and teaching with a like-minded colleague, using your school library as the learning hub and centre of inquiry. If your school has not yet adopted a learning commons approach, I invite you to consider, as a school community, the potential of your school library to create a feast of learning, for teachers and students alike.
Photo: Nicholas Monu (iStock)
First published in Education Canada, January 2014
EN BREF – L’ancien modèle de bibliothèque n’est plus sain pour le personnel enseignant ou pour les élèves. La conversion d’une bibliothèque scolaire en carrefour d’apprentissage constitue l’une des meilleures recettes de réussite scolaire dans le contexte actuel de réforme de l’éducation. La bibliothèque comme carrefour d’apprentissage fonctionne comme une plaque tournante de l’école, où les enseignants et les élèves collaborent, où l’apprentissage fondé sur l’enquête est favorisé et où les enseignants-bibliothécaires soutiennent chacun des membres du personnel enseignant de l’école et engendrent une culture de lecture dynamique.
[1] David V. Loertscher, Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, The New Learning Commons: Where learners win! (Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research and Publishing, 2008),123.
[2] Kristin Fontichiaro and Sandy Buczynski, “Connecting Science Notebooking to the Elementary Library Media Center,” in 21st Century Learning in School Libraries, ed. K. Fontichiaro (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2009), 161.
[3] Alberta Learning, Focus on Inquiry: A teacher’s guide to implementing inquiry-based learning (Edmonton, AB: Alberta Learning, 2004), 26.
[4] Ken Haycock, “Research in School Library Programs Linking Teacher-librarians, School Libraries and Student Achievement,” in Achieving Information Literacy: Standards for school library programs in Canada, eds. M. Asselin, J. L. Branch, and D. Oberg (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Association for School Libraries, 2003).
[5] Allison Zmuda and Violet H. Harada, Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the learning imperative for the 21st century (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008), 4.
[6] Zmuda and Harada, Librarians as Learning Specialists, 4.
[7] Ken Haycock, “Leadership from the Middle: Building influence for change,” in The Many Faces of School Library Leadership, ed. Sharon Coatney (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2010), 5.
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The Fear Factor
Comments Off on The Fear FactorIn 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at one of the world’s most innovative corporations, 3M, invented an adhesive that left no residue. Unfortunately, it didn’t really bind anything either and, as a failed experiment, it was quietly forgotten. There was – and still is – nothing remarkable about a failed experiment at 3M. Over half of their inventions never make it into production.
Eight years later, another 3M scientist, Art Fry, was getting frustrated in church. The makeshift scraps of paper he was using as bookmarks for his hymnal kept falling out. Remembering Spencer’s glue that didn’t stick, Art started tinkering with paper-backed adhesives to create a removable hymnal bookmark.
We know it today as the Post-It note.
It’s a classic example of the capacity, in the words of an equally successful company, to “fail fast and iterate.” Google got the idea for their famous 20 percent “free time” (where employees can spend a day a week doing their own projects) from 3M, who first instigated 15 percent employee time in 1948. Google has only a slightly better failure rate than 3M: 36 percent of Google’s inventions fail, though many of their failures have successful iterations further down the line.
To those of us working in education, the culture of innovation lived by Google and 3M seems both fearless and enviable. How many of us would keep our jobs if half of what we tried didn’t work? How many of us are given generous amounts of time to experiment in our practice?
Due to what we in England call the “accountability framework,” most school leaders would be more likely to describe themselves as fearful, rather than fearless. Innovation happens slowly, and incrementally, in public schooling. The fear factor hangs over education ministers, who have to show an impact over a four- to five-year electoral cycle. It hangs over school and district administrators, who have to demonstrate “turnaround” in failing schools. And it hangs over teachers and students, who seem to be continually exhorted to “do more, work harder,” not “reflect more, work smarter.” The fear factor is one reason why, as Sir Ken Robinson remarked, “we keep trying to build a better steam engine” rather than radically re-invent education. Most would acknowledge that, compared to the incredible rate of innovation over the past 150 years in science or industry, things move slowly in education – and it can’t be because we think it’s about as good as it gets.
In working with teachers and school leaders in the U.K., Australia and North America, I’ve witnessed periodic periods of fear and demoralization. I believe that while some of those fears are justified, some are not. Before looking at ways in which we can stimulate schools to become more innovative, let’s look at what seems to be holding us back, structurally and culturally.
Structural innovation blockers
“It’s the system.”
In the U.S. and England (where, arguably, the fear factor is greatest), current strategies seem to involve carrots and sticks. The Obama administration recently completed the first three-year cycle of the Investing in Innovation program, dedicated to finding “innovative solutions to common educational challenges.” The English equivalent is the Education Endowment Fund, instigated to encourage innovations to “break the link between family income and educational achievement.” While the change of direction from both administrations, previously “best known for mandating compliance and disbursing formula funds,”[1] is to be welcomed, both funds have been criticized for overly narrow eligibility criteria and overly prescriptive evaluation requirements.
The top-down fostering of innovation also has to be seen against what is perceived by school leaders as an ever-increasing emphasis upon standardized testing and payment by results.
“They won’t let us innovate.”
After lengthy demands for compliance, it’s perhaps understandable that school leaders would be hesitant about taking the path less trodden. When, in 2005, the Innovation Unit[2] was part of the U.K. Labour government’s Department for Education, it was mandated to offer schools the “Power to Innovate.” This gave schools temporary exemption from statutory regulation, should their innovation benefit from it. An overwhelming majority of schools who applied for this exemption were advised that they didn’t actually need it – what they were proposing lay within the regulatory framework anyway.
Once established, a culture of compliance is remarkably difficult to break.
“Innovation flows down, not up.”
Many teachers have experienced, over the past decade, some loss of autonomy in their practice. The introduction of the Common Core Standards in the U.S. is perhaps the latest example. Accompanying this has been the rise of the “executive leader” of schools. Once charged with turning around a failing school, such administrators inevitably bring sweeping change into the organization, reinforcing the notion that for teachers, innovation is done to them, rather than done by them.
In sharp contrast, the growth of personal learning networks, social media and social learning phenomena like TeachMeet events[3] are reversing this pattern. Teachers engaging in peer-to-peer learning offers the best hope not only for innovation flowing upwards, but also for models of distributed leadership.
I have experienced this first-hand through the Musical Futures program.[4] Musical Futures has been engaging students for 11 years, originating in England, but now operating in seven different countries, including Canada. We learned some time ago that the way to get an education innovation to spread was by engaging teachers in develop-ing new practices: prototyping, testing, reflecting, redesigning. But we started in a single country, before the advent of social media. Now, Musical Futures teachers globally share their videos, resources and lesson plans through a virtual sharing wall, Facebook, and a weekly Twitter meet-up. One tweet from a teacher sums up the excitement felt by this form of global, do-it-yourself professional development: “This is the best staffroom EVER!”
Cultural innovation blockers
“Why should my child be the guinea pig?”
I was once explaining an initiative I was leading to an English politician, only to be halted by the phrase every education innovator dreads: “So, you think it’s OK to treat these kids as guinea pigs, do you?” This populist favourite is inevitably followed by, “Kids only get one chance at a good education.”
Indeed they do. But, while I have met many children whose schooling was blighted by mind-numbing repetition and routine, a child’s school career is long, and I have yet to meet any who felt they were penalized by being part of a new innovation. Quite the reverse – most students are happy to be seen as pioneers of a new form of pedagogy. The demand for places at charter schools in the U.S., and free schools in the U.K., suggests that parents, too, are less concerned about the guinea-pig syndrome.
“If all else fails, or no one’s looking, innovate.”
Schools, in most developed countries with strong accountability frameworks, aren’t judged on their levels of innovation. They are judged, primarily, on test scores. There is, therefore, precious little incentive for good mainstream schools to try new teaching practices which ultimately may not work.
Radical, disruptive innovations are most frequently seen in so-called failing schools, where tweaking or incremental change is insufficient. Hartsholme Academy, in Lincoln, U.K., is a prime example. When Carl Jarvis became Head Teacher there in 2009, the school was under threat of closure. It was ranked the 5th worst school in England.
The fear factor, however, was absent, since there was no realistic future for the school. Carl changed everything – except the teachers he inherited. Out went desks, in came iPads for all students. Out went worksheets, in came immersive learning environments, project- and challenge-based learning, and pedagogy based upon latest neuroscience findings. Three years later, the English schools inspections agency deemed Hartsholme to be “beyond outstanding” (outstanding is the highest achievable classification). Despite this astonishing achievement, the Hartsholme innovations are dismissed by many as non-transferable, applicable only to failing, inner-city schools.
Charles Leadbeater has written extensively on our failure to learn from the innovations which take place “in the margins.” Because they are only in our peripheral vision, we fail to see their wider applicability. Leadbeater argues that solutions which are found in developing countries or in alternative educational settings are not just instructive, they are the future: “Too often, entrepreneurship and innovation have been seen as marginal add-ons. In the century to come, they have to become the new mainstream.”[5]
Feel the fear and do it anyway
One of the world’s leading management experts, W. E. Deming, believed there were five deadly diseases of management:
1. Lack of constancy of purpose – not understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing;
2. Emphasis upon short-term profits – leading to “shipping stuff out, no matter what,” and “creative accounting”;
3. Annual rating of performance – the merit system encourages short-term performance. It annihilates planning, it annihilates teamwork. You don’t get ahead by being collaborative, you get ahead by getting ahead;
4. Mobility of management – the valorising of those who can quickly turn around a company’s performance, but do so by a scorched-earth policy and then quickly move on;
5. Use of visible figures only – only valuing what can be easily measured.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how these can be applied to many current national education policies, and how they contribute to a climate of fear and mistrust.
So how do school leaders navigate the murky waters between what social theorist Barry Schwartz describes as “doing the right thing, or doing the required thing?” Undoubtedly, the hierarchically imposed fear factor puts pressure on leaders to do the required thing. But there are enough inspiring examples of school leaders and superintendents who have felt the fear and done the right thing anyway to give us all hope. There is probably little we can do to persuade our political leaders of the need to do the one single thing which, above all else, would remove the fear factor: de-politicize education. But there is plenty we can do, as a community of practitioners, to support innovation without fear.
First, we can look outside our own discipline for inspiration. It is, after all, what leaders of innovative schools do. Books by management gurus Peter Senge, Ricardo Semler, Teresa Amabile and Clayton Christensen are just as likely to be on their bookshelves as classic education texts.
Innovative schools seem to chare a common characteristic: their teachers are expected to be designers of learning, not simply deliverers.
Second, we can see that innovative organizations, like Google and 3M, create a safe space for experimentation, giving people trust, time and permission to fail.
Third, great leaders see their schools as porous global learning commons. When Stephen Harris, principal of Northern Beaches Christian School in Sydney, set up the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning, it was to ensure that his teachers would go around the world, visit great schools, and feel supported to embed those practices in their classrooms.
Fourth, leaders like Harris understand that innovation is a mindset, a culture, not a one-off experiment. To support that mindset they de-privatize the act of teaching, seeing teaching as a team sport, not a solitary activity. Critically, innovative schools seem to share a common characteristic: their teachers are expected to be designers of learning, not simply deliverers.
Fifth, centres of innovation have their own yardsticks by which they want to be assessed. Great schools aren’t blown off course by a single set of disappointing test scores. Instead they have a constancy of purpose, informed by their own success criteria, often less visible than those imposed upon them. Thomas Edison arguably created the most innovative learning environment we have yet seen. Despite filing over 400 patents in six years, Edison insisted that his “inventions factory” at Menlo Park should be judged, not by its successes, but by the number of experiments carried out on any given day.
In most developed countries, we have a more conducive environment for innovation than we’ve had for many years – though not without restrictions. More importantly, perhaps, we are seeing global networks of innovators forming through social media. Instead of simply relying upon their schools or their leaders. they are being emboldened by each other’s ideas and mutual passion for learning. One of those taking part in the Musical Futures pilot was Sandie Heckel, a music teacher at the District School Board of Niagara, Ontario. This was her reflection on innovating within a community of practitioners:
“No longer was I the sole music/arts teacher in my school – I now had the support of teachers around the world who, like me, were going through the same struggles to get kids involved in authentic music making. This community of teacher learners, whose brains I could pick at any given moment through Facebook and Twitter, were an invaluable support. I especially appreciated seeing the videos of their students’ work posted on the Sharing Wall, as did my students.
In this project, the learning was collaborative, continuous, and evolved over time. It allowed me to struggle with new ideas and in the end make a fundamental shift in the way I teach – from almost exclusively instructing students how to make music, to facilitating my students’ collaborative search to make music of their choosing. The shift was radical and the shift is permanent, and the nature of this PD was key in making that happen.”
If experiences like Sandie’s aren’t enough to persuade us to overcome our fears, we have to consider the alternative. To simply continue teaching the way that we ourselves were taught – when the world is changing so quickly – is to be immobilized by fear.
As John Dewey said, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”
Illustration: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – Contrastant avec ce qui se passe dans les organisations les plus innovatrices du monde, l’innovation se produit lentement dans les écoles publiques. L’auteur explore les « facteurs de crainte » qui empêchent d’innover en éducation, incluant les inhibiteurs structuraux et culturels. D’après les caractéristiques observées dans les centres d’innovation, les leaders en éducation peuvent néanmoins faire beaucoup pour appuyer l’innovation : chercher de l’inspiration hors de leur discipline, formuler leurs propres critères de réussite; procurer un espace d’expérimentation sans risque; accorder aux gens leur confiance, du temps et la permission d’échouer. Voir les écoles comme des lieux communs, poreux et mondiaux d’apprentissage, les enseignants comme des concepteurs (et pas seulement des dispensateurs) d’apprentissage, et l’enseignement comme un sport d’équipe (plutôt que comme une activité solitaire) constitue un changement de perspective puissant et motivant. En conclusion, l’auteur aborde les réseaux mondiaux d’innovateurs qui surgissent présentement grâce aux médias sociaux qui constituent une nouvelle force dynamique accélérant la façon dont l’innovation est partagée, adoptée et raffinée.
[1] K. Smith and J. Peterson, Supporting and Scaling Change: Lessons from the first round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) program (Bellwether Education Partners: 2011).
[3] http://teachmeet.pbworks.com
[5] C. Leadbeater and A. Wong, Learning From The Extremes (Cisco: 2010).
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Game Changers
Comments Off on Game ChangersIn my first year as a high-school teacher I was des-perate for ways to hook the kids. I was tasked with teaching science and math to students who had failed multiple times in a credit recovery program. My meticulously crafted lesson plans were no match for an easily distracted 16-year-old.
I soon realized that one of the only things that would keep them engaged was a game. From memorizing Jeopardy clues to calculating probability in the throw of dice, these games added an element of frivolity around achievement, one that decoupled accomplishment from grades and peer judgment, but focused on score bars and points.
The games I used were pretty lightweight: they were engaging but not innovative. One of their favorites, Periodic Table Bingo, consisted of a bingo card filled out with symbols of elements. With games like these, there is no direct connection between the content of the game and the design of the game mechanics. The bingo cards could have been filled out with French vocab or math questions.
Contrast this with The History of Biology, a game from Toronto’s Spongelab Interactive with over 64,000 players worldwide. “Devices we use to advance the storyline are actually teaching them things about biology,” says game creator and Spongelab CEO Jeremy Friedberg. In the game, users are led on a DaVinci Code-like scavenger hunt around the web, decoding clues.
“One of the characters has hidden a secret message in a genetic sequence,” says Friedberg, “and the player has to translate it to get the message.” The game sends kids to “real websites, fake websites, and real websites hosting fake content, which teaches students digital literacy and research skills.” So not only are they learning about biology, but they are learning 21st century learning skills of use in any course.
This is the kind of innovative game that could not have existed in past generations. Digital technologies have allowed game design to reach beyond mere memorization and into the complex, multi-layered world of digital story-telling.
In 2011, game designer Jane McGonigal published Reality is Broken, where she outlined four simple rules that define a game: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Both Jeopardy and The History of Biology fit this definition, but clearly there is a difference between games that teach the recall of facts and those that teach higher-order thinking skills.
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, based at children’s media powerhouse Sesame Workshop, published a paper in 2011 called “Games for a Digital Age.” They distinguish between short-form games, “which provide tools for practice and focused concepts,” and long-form games, “which are focused on higher order thinking skills.” This is a useful first distinction teachers can use when evaluating games for use in the classroom.
Other taxonomies apply, which can be used to filter games based on the learning goals of each lesson. Massive multi-player games like World of Warcraft are great at encouraging cooperation, whereas strategy games like Civilization emphasize decision making in the face of complexity. So-called “sandbox games” like Minecraft encourage creativity, curiosity and experimentation.
A theme that comes up with teachers who use long-form video games is teaching empathy. “When I first started teaching natural disasters in Grade 7, there were case studies in the textbook, or videos,” says Mike Farley, a high-school teacher at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS). “When we invite students to play a simulation like Stop Disasters or Inside the Haiti Earthquake, they are more immersed; there’s more of an emotional learning.”
When playing Inside the Haiti Earthquake, students can experience the event from the point of view of a journalist, a survivor, or an aid worker. They are given choices based on their character, which increases their level of engagement. “They start to understand the complexities of planning for a disaster or planning for the after-effects,” says Farley.
This effect was multiplied when the students worked in small groups, he adds, because they needed to justify their choices to the group members. “They couldn’t just click through the game to see what happened. There was a certain creative friction in the groups.”
The innovation here is not the high-quality digital interface, nor the idea of using games to represent experiences in the classroom. The innovation is in combining the two into a new pedagogical reality. Scenarios, set up so kids can experience different perspectives, are “played out” in a highly realistic, immersive environment, which serves to increase their feeling of connection to the topic.
A unique learning experience
UTS Principal Rosemary Evans sees these as “unique learning experiences,” different for each student with each session of play. “What excites me is the experiential component,” she says. “The simulations lead to an authentic experience, where the game environment represents different points of view.”
Justin Medved , the Director of Instructional Innovation at The York School, likes to talk about “layers of learning” taking place in the best games. “To what extent does the game offer an experience that offers some critical thinking, decision making, complexity, or opportunity for discussion and debate?” says Medved. The content is the first layer the students interact with, but meta-content skills can take longer to teach. Medved looks for “any opportunity for players to go out and do some research and thinking before coming back to the game.” Many games, says Medved, are super-fast and he tries to intentionally slow them down to allow for deeper thinking. “We want some level of learning to be slow, to discuss bias or different perspectives. Over time you can see a narrative unfolding.”
Reflection after game play is crucial to develop meta-cognitive skills related to regulation and understanding consequences: key skills that are just emerging in the teenage years. “The game can’t do it all for you,” says Medved. “We need to teach out the best bits of the game and know when to stop, when to take a break.” Innovative teachers like Medved have gone beyond the knee-jerk reaction against “kids staring at screens” and have developed rich curricula by using new and powerful game engines.
Music teachers around the world have been trying to strike a balance between hooking kids to games like Guitar Hero and picking up real instruments. Rock Band 3 has been the source of academic study on whether its use increases learning of music. One study from 2011 looked at 26 students in an after-school program structured around Rock Band. The study found a “a significant correlation between the number of Rock Band sessions and the overall scores on the traditional music assessments.”
The researchers found that it was not the mechanics of game play that allowed for musical learning (the instruments themselves are not “real” instruments but game controllers that look like the real thing). Rather, the development of the skills of listening to musical phrases was the key variable. This combined with a mechanism for immediate formative assessment by the game allowed for rapid improvement.
Kids are naturally pulled in by this emphasis on “play.” In New York City, the Institute of Play has created an entire school based on game mechanics called Quest to Learn. The school “mimics the design principles of games by framing every piece of the curriculum as a mission that involves game strategies like collaboration, role-playing and simulation.” Teachers send kids on “missions” to dig up content, much like The History of Biology treats knowledge discovery as a giant scavenger hunt.
This complex game-world is a long way from some of the first simulations, such as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?(1985) and Oregon Trail (1971). Educational games have since grown to a 2-billion dollar industry. Friedberg sees this market being fueled by the promise of differentiating instruction for students. “Games are the most sophisticated data collection tool we have ever found,” he says.
Properly constructed game engines, like Spongelab, can tell exactly when and where a student gets stuck on a concept, or how they find their way through game. “For the first time we have the ability to use data to understand how you learn, and what you need,” he says.
Game developers can collect millions of data points from the way a student plays a game and give pointed, personalized feedback, or direct students through content in a certain way. The innovative component is not the game itself, but the way the game is used to guide the child’s learning.
Friedberg points out the strong connection between in-game performance and real-life performance. Flight simulators, for example, can learn a pilot’s weaknesses and test those to a breaking point. “The simulator allows players to think critically in stressful situations, to be creative when things go wrong.” These critical failure scenarios cannot be tried out in real life. “Exploring, trying and failure are incredibly valuable,” he says. “Games allow us to train and assess those abilities.”
Games like this provide a safe place for students to grapple with complex topics and fail. In games, failure is expected. The consequence of failure in a game is that you hit restart and begin again. There are no grades inside games, no letters home to parents.
The question of whether to game or not game in class is not one of technology. It is one of pedagogy that starts and ends with the teacher. It is our job to provide a framework for deciding which games can be used in which contexts, and to use the best of the game world to inspire our students to higher-order thinking.
Illustration: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – L’utilisation de jeux pour enseigner des sujets précis en classe n’a rien de nouveau. Les jeux peuvent toutefois servir, également, à développer des capacités de raisonnement d’ordre supérieur comme la pensée critique, la prise de décision, la créativité et la communication. L’enseignant doit contextualiser les jeux dits « de longue durée » et les incorporer à un robuste programme d’activités complémentaires. Des sociétés innovatrices produisant des jeux éducatifs développent du contenu numérique de grande qualité, en tenant compte des implications pédagogiques de l’intégration d’un jeu dans un programme éducatif existant. Les données recueillies de ces jeux numériques peuvent servir à personnaliser l’enseignement donné aux élèves qui bloquent sur certains concepts ou qui apprennent d’une façon particulière. Au fur et à mesure que les jeux se raffinent, l’enseignant doit approfondir sa connaissance de la façon dont les élèves les utilisent en classe.
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From Bright Idea to System Change
Comments Off on From Bright Idea to System ChangeInnovation in education occurs frequently. A teacher tries something new – he or she reads about it, tries it, refines it and eventually incorporates it into practice; a principal adopts a new form of professional development; a district adopts adaptive assessment technologies; a school ends parent-teacher nights, instead offering social events during which a teacher will quietly chat with a parent about how their child is doing. These small, so-called adopt/adapt innovations are commonplace. They take the form of adopting an idea gathered from somewhere else and adapting it to local circumstance.
Usually when there is talk of innovation the assumption is that it will be disruptive. For example, Alberta’s decision to phase out Provincial Achievement Tests by 2017 and replace them with diagnostic assessments at the beginning of Grades 3, 6 and 9 (and possibly at the start of each school year) using online assessment tools is a major change and will likely be disruptive, at least at first. It is more disruptive when we see this as a shift from “assessment of learning” to “assessment for learning.” Britain’s decision to offer schools the opportunity to cede from the control of a local education authority (school board) and operate as an independent “academy” is disruptive – especially given that any community organization can now establish a free school or academy. The U.S. decision to push a common core curriculum for the nation as a whole is disruptive of local autonomy.
When we look at the pattern of innovation over the career of a teacher, we see that the majority of the innovations he or she will experience are adopt/adapt innovations. While the disruptive innovations come with a great deal of upset and anxiety, they represent a small portion of the innovation experience of a teacher – less than ten percent. The bulk of innovation in education is adopt/adapt.
Adopt/adapt innovation is not to be confused with continuous improvement. True innovation is a different practice which produces significantly different outputs, outcomes and impacts which can be measured. Continuous improvement tends just to modestly improve how something is done with barely discernible impacts on outcomes and impacts. The key difference between innovation and continuous improvement is the scale of the change and the sustaining impact of that change.
The focus for innovation
Innovation in education can be focused on one or more of what McKinsey & Co. refer to as “the seven S’s.”[1]
1. Structure: an innovation that changes how a school, group of schools, district or jurisdiction is structured and organized and, by doing so, improves the outcomes of the organization in specific and sustained ways. The structural changes in the U.K. are examples of this reform as are the increasing number of collaborations between Catholic and public school boards (including shared schools) in Canada.
2. Staff: a change in the way staff are deployed or engaged in their work that produces gains in performance. The use of teaching assistants and specialists with respect to special needs is an example here.
3. Strategy: a change in the strategic intent of the organization that produces sustained gains in outcomes. The decision to personalize the learning activities within a school by leveraging technology and seeing this as a core advantage of the school would be one example. Another would be a school that, in addition to pursuing the provincial curriculum, specializes in art and design or science.
4. Systems: business process innovations that significantly improve both efficiency and outcomes, such that the organization is seen to have made a significant performance improvement. The use of adaptive assessment technologies to track learning on a regular (daily, every other day, weekly) basis, as practiced in Abu Dhabi schools, is an example here.
5. Style/culture: innovative changes in the culture and style of the organization that lead to significant measurable changes in an aspect of the performance of the organization – the widespread use of problem-based learning and constructivist teaching would be an example here.
6. Shared values: innovations that lead to the strengthening of the shared values of the organization within a group of stakeholders or across more than one group of stakeholders, which lead to performance improvements.
7. Skills: the way in which each person in the organization demonstrates a high level of execution of the skills they possess and how the organization enables the continuous development of skill.
Educational innovation can be about just one of these changes or some combination of them – indeed, major innovations usually involve three or more of the S’s. Also note that outcomes need to be defined and measured. Just saying “things are better” isn’t good enough – tangible evidence is needed. For example, does improving shared values increase attendance or lead to higher learning outcomes in a school system? Does changing how we act with respect to attendance improve attendance and learning outcomes and lower the costs of doing so? Does an innovation in relation to an online learning strategy increase access to learning for those who otherwise would not have access to this learning?
Here is a working definition of successful innovation: innovation is a deliberate action that leads to significant and sustained overall positive improvement in the performance of a school or school system on one or more dimensions of the 7S’s.
Sustaining innovation
Some innovations “stick” and some don’t. For example, some innovations are very much the product of the person who introduced them and they do not survive their departure from a school or school system. Some reforms of education – said to be innovations at the time – are temporary and linked to a particular Minister of Education. Some also don’t produce the results that were anticipated – colour coding for learning to read is one example.
In a review of the work undertaken by the Innovation Expedition for the Peter Drucker Awards for Non Profit Innovation in Canada (1993-2000), we looked at outcomes in terms of the following categories. The more an innovation led to change in one or more of these categories, the more sustainable it was:
Innovative practices: the extent to which the organization has had to adopt new work practices, new methods, and new thinking so as to make the project or activity happen.
Organization-wide impact: some projects or activities relate to a small part of the work of the organization, while others have a broader impact on all aspects of the organization’s work. This dimension examines the extent of the impact of a project or activity on the organization.
Outcome: the impact of the activity or project as expressed by outcome measures – specifically, measures of key performance that compare some old way of working with a new, more innovative way of working.
Sustainability: projects or activities that have a strong likelihood of having an impact over time, and creating a continuing momentum for change, are more valued on this dimension than those innovative projects that are “one off” and have an immediate, short-term impact but are not sustainable.
Replicability: a key criteria for the award is the degree to which a project or activity conducted in one organization could be and is likely to be transferred to another – what we have termed here “replicability.” This dimension measures the extent to which a project or activity could be transferred to another organization.
Partnership building: the extent to which the project or activity has created and strengthened alliances and partnerships between two or more organizations in the nonprofit sector or between the nonprofit and private sectors or between the nonprofit and government sectors.
Reviewing hundreds of submissions over the life of this Award, it soon became clear that tangible outcomes and replicability (which might now be called scalability) were key aspects of powerful innovations that proved to be sustainable.
The process of innovation
Denning and Dunham[2] have studied innovation in a variety of settings. Doing so has enabled them to outline a process map of the steps required for an innovation to “catch” and “stick.” It involves three key building blocks and a number of steps.
The first building block they call “the work of invention.” This requires the innovator (an individual or team) to imagine, sense and envision what an opportunity for innovation looks like. For example, when the team at Derek Taylor School (K-9) in Grande Prairie decided that a strong, systematic and strategic focus on emotional intelligence could establish the right culture and create the capacity for high performance, they sensed that this would be the key to their new school, the well-being of its 700 students and being able to establish a positive reputation in the community of Mission Heights. They elaborated their thinking through workshops, study groups, and the use of supports from professional advisors and central office. This work was pre-planning – just scoping.
Having scoped and sensed the work, the staff needed to envision collectively what an innovation might look like – were they looking at embedding emotional intelligence activities and work across the curriculum, just doing occasional work in assemblies and home-room time or other kinds of activities? Was it to be for all students, or just K-5? There were three full staff meetings and a staff workshop before they landed on a plan.
The next building block is referred to as “the work of adoption.” In our Derek Taylor example, staff decided to develop their own resources and activities for homeroom use, assemblies and for use across the curriculum. They began to offer their activities and assignments and quickly adapted them as experience in their use grew. Over the course of a year, over 150 activities were developed, used and shared amongst all staff. Not all worked as well as they might – some were enhanced, others worked every time they were used and some were consigned to the “good try, but not again” bin.
Some staff lacked confidence in their own materials and their use. They felt that they should be using commercial materials, even though they were very expensive. The Alberta Teachers Association paid for some staff to visit a school making use of the commercial materials. This was a key “tipping point” for Derek Taylor School. The teachers returned with the strong view that their own materials were either just as good as or superior to those available commercially and that their school had a more integrated strategy for their use than the other schools they had visited which were using the commercial product. They realized that their innovation was the integration of emotional intelligence into every aspect of the school, not just the occasional use of materials when it seemed appropriate.
This work of adoption involved offering, adopting and sustaining the work. It also involved measuring the impact. Teachers, students and parents developed simple measures of emotional intelligence and began to use these to capture what the students were learning and experiencing. They also ran art projects to capture “the faces of emotion” and encouraged students to use them as a basis for diary-keeping and tracking. Parents and local community members (e.g. shopkeepers, school bus drivers) were also asked to log examples of students showing emotional intelligence (or the lack of it).
In these ways this work became embedded in the work of the school – it was strategic, represented shared values and became a feature of the “style” of the school. This stage of innovation is known as “creating the environment for next practice.” Teachers and school leaders used the work on emotional intelligence to explore and better understand how they were able, as an adult learning community, to create and implement something which had a long-term and sustainable impact on the work of the school. They were able to use this insight and understanding to work on their next innovation – linking emotional intelligence to the learning performance of students.
The Derek Taylor School is not unique in this work. Other examples abound of powerful innovations. For example, in London (Ontario), teachers have adopted and adapted the program Musical Futures, which is transforming the ways in which musical education is pursued by students. Based on a U.K. initiative from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, this program is offered at Montcalm Secondary School and Our Lady Immaculate with the support of Western University’s Faculty of Music and is a transformative program, likely to expand across Canada.[3]
Differences provide fertile ground for innovation. Unique high-performing schools, not “bog standard schools,” are what we should be looking for.
None of these developments happen overnight – they take time (Derek Taylor School’s journey took three years), are messy and involve many missteps and “retakes” – but they are all led by people who are passionate about “their” innovation and are focused in a systematic and measured way on implementation. Rather than being “whiz-kids” who have a brilliant flash of light and a sudden inspiration, educational innovators tend to be those who have nurtured ideas over a period of time, have looked locally, regionally, nationally and internationally at how something is done and sense and imagine a different and better way of doing something. It’s the combination of passion, commitment and determination, diligence and adaptability that enables a person to become an educational innovator. Providing, that is, that there are some systems supports for innovation in place.
Systems that enable innovation
There are five conditions that need to be in place at the systems level to enable effective innovation within the school and to ensure that innovation “sticks.” These are:
1. Schools are recognized as the key decision centres within a district or system in which they operate. That is, they can act quickly and effectively in support of innovation without layers of permission or approval. In the Canadian system, for example, it is the school, not the central office, that should be enabling innovative activities. The role of the Superintendent is that of servant leader – enabling, encouraging, easing the way. It should also be clear that “no one size fits all” – that schools have a lot of similarity between them, but it is their differences that will provide fertile ground for innovation. Unique high-performing schools, not “bog standard schools,” are what we should be looking for.
2. Schools are resourced for the work they are asked to do and these resources are stable. The cry from school systems for a basic planning period of three to five years of rolling, stable funding is a cry for help. Schools cannot innovate if they do not know from year to year what their resource base will be. It is inefficient and ineffective. What schools need is a degree of certainty about base funding and people resources.
3. Investment in professional development and planning time. Teachers, as professionals at the leading edge of learning developments, need time to plan, research and prepare. In high-performing school systems this time is used for innovation, both small- and large-scale. Teachers cannot be expected to fully leverage new models of learning or new technology without first being able to look at and review the potential of these approaches and resources. We would not tolerate a doctor who has not spent a considerable time keeping up with current developments in medicine or who did not engage in professional development. It is no different for a professional teacher. The balance between time in class and time to prepare and innovate needs to be right.
4. Support for risk taking. The idea that “you can take as many risks as you like as long as they are 100 percent successful” is not an idea that sits well if innovation is the agenda. All innovation is a risk. Sometimes a great idea will not work. Good schools will make honest mistakes. The rule here is “we tried, we learned, we moved on and the students are fine.” A former Minister of Education in Alberta once complained that there were too few failures in our system in terms of approaches to learning. He was right.
5. Recognition. The reward and recognition mechanisms within a school and within a school district should support an agenda for innovation and change rather than inhibit it. For example, when school performance is measured on standardized tests and nothing else, and when schools can be subject to “special measures” for failing to meet some arbitrary improvement target they themselves did not set, then innovation is unlikely to occur. Innovation is a risk business and successful risk taking should be rewarded through appropriate methods of recognition and reward. Many teacher reward and recognition systems, especially in the U.S., are now making innovation less likely to occur.
When these conditions are in place and teachers are seen as instructional leaders, supported by positional leaders acting as servant leaders, then truly remarkable things can happen. Look around – innovation is everywhere.
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – Malgré sa nature itérative et confuse, le processus d’innovation comporte des étapes et des processus distincts. Les trois principales étapes sont les suivantes : a) le travail d’invention – développer une idée qui apporte une contribution réelle; b) le travail d’adoption – s’assurer que d’autres, en particulier des dirigeants et des collègues immédiats, adoptent l’invention et l’adaptent à leur contexte spécifique; c) la mise en place de l’environnement pour la « prochaine » pratique – mobiliser d’autres personnes et faire accepter l’innovation à l’échelle du système. L’article signale aussi certains pièges et suggère certains aspects à privilégier.
[1] For more information about the Seven S’s, see this description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_7S_Framework
[2] P. J. Denning and B. Dunham, The Innovator’s Way: Essential practices for successful innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
[3] See Stephen Hurley’s account of this exciting innovation at: http://teachingoutloud.org/2012/06/13/musical-futures-canada-london-calling/
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Innovation vs Circulasticity
Comments Off on Innovation vs CirculasticityLet me begin this article with a word I invented: Circulasticity. A combination of the words circular and elasticity, it is an organizational condition that generates contexts or situations in which high levels of activity are noted, but any discernible long-term change is not.
Circulasticity permeates much of the work currently going on in the world of education, especially when we discuss innovation in education. There are multiple examples of how circulasticity asserts itself in environments where innovation is supposedly present. Because of the elasticity of circulasticity, “innovation” stretches the core environment, but is eventually brought back to the central traditional core and becomes more of an “improvement” than a change catalyst.
So what do I mean by innovation? According to Webster, it is:
1) the introduction of something new; 2) a new idea, method, or device. Various Ministries of Education in Canada and internationally have their own definitions. Most interestingly, they could all contain circulasticity.
In my opinion, true innovation in education will only happen when a new structure is created: one that nurtures critical thinkers, supports risk-takers and encourages ongoing transformation, and that places a high value on creative and insightful learning / teaching in classrooms. This new structure is defined by the research that has been studying how successful institutions evolve, compared to those that have difficulty initiating any change, whether it be innovation or simple improvements. As Martin Hays wrote in his analysis of organizational wisdom, “Organizational wisdom transcends organizational learning in its commitment to doing the right things over doing things right.”[1]
At the current time, educational organizations are mired in structures that have significant “blind spots” for innovation or creativity. These blind spots are the structures themselves, since they were designed along an industrial model that favours uniformity and compliance and has no explicit place or mechanism for including creativity and innovation. Hence they simply don’t allow for innovation to be replicated or made systemic.
Have you ever wondered why “alternative high schools for dropouts” have significantly higher success rates than the traditional high schools that feed them? Have you ever asked yourself why such successful models, which are mostly very different from the traditional models, are not made systemic? In our current model of education, economies of scale will trump any widespread innovation. And yet, if we injected actuarial costs to the education system and held it financially accountable for graduates over a 20-30 year period of time, we would quickly realize that investing heavily now greatly reduces societal costs in the future.
It is not that the people working in education are of bad faith. To the contrary, their intentions are noble and deserve our full support and respect. And there is no shortage of creative and imaginative people in education.
Nor is it the vision building that impedes innovation from occurring. To date, I confess I have likely read hundreds, if not thousands, of visions on 21st century curriculum, assessments, schools, classrooms, teachers and students. There is no shortage on the vision front!
Where everything seems to bog down is in the implementation component. As John Kotter eloquently describes in his book Buy-In: Saving your good idea from getting shot down, there are four main change impediments that people use: 1) Fear Mongering, 2) Death by Delay, 3) Confusion, 4) Ridicule.[2] In education, these four elements can be translated into: 1) Need Research, 2) Need Results, 3) Need Support, 4) Need Financing. The irony is that even if all four parts of this requirement are met, it still doesn’t serve to create innovative practices. What we need is a work environment that openly values creativity, risk-taking and courage; its lack remains the single greatest impediment to innovation in education.
The past three or four decades have presented ample opportunities for true innovation to occur in our schools and classrooms. In particular, the ubiquitous presence of technology can be an important enabler; however, the level of quality and transformational integration remains spotty across Canada. Technology has the potential to be a significant catalyst of learning and teaching. Innovation initiatives that include laptop technology, write Weston and Bain, “collectively represent heretofore-unattained scale and disturbance in the equilibrium of classrooms and schools (Dwyer, 2000) and disruption in the educational paradigm (Christensen et al., 2008).”[3]
And so, innovation, as traditionally defined, remains more of an elusive objective in education than an emerging reality. We debate the issue; we define the issue; and we design the issue. But moving the innovation agenda forward is an entirely different issue.
All of this ultimately brings us to a key question, that is, where do we go from here? In the words of Joseph Connor, “The quality of a question is not judged by its complexity but by the complexity of the thinking that it provokes.”[4] True transformation will ultimately have to begin with a courageous act from an individual or individuals to enact the deep structural changes that are so needed.
Photo: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – Pourquoi est-il si difficile d’apporter des changements vraiment novateurs en éducation? L’auteur a concocté le néologisme « circulasticité » pour décrire la tendance « élastique » de résistance au changement d’un système. La circulasticité fait que l’innovation étire l’environnement central, mais finit par être ramenée au noyau traditionnel, devenant davantage une « amélioration » qu’un catalyseur de changement. Ce phénomène se produit notamment dans le système d’éducation, qui privilégie l’uniformité et la conformité, sans être doté d’un mécanisme explicite intégrant la créativité et l’innovation. Ainsi, l’innovation véritable en éducation ne se généralisera que lorsque sera instaurée une nouvelle structure favorisant l’épanouissement de penseurs critiques, soutenant les preneurs de risque et encourageant la transformation continue.
[1] J. Martin Hays, “Dynamics of Organisational Wisdom,” Business Renaissance Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 79.
[2] John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead, Buy-In: Saving your good idea from getting shot down (Boston: Harvard Business Review, 2010).
[3] Mark E. Weston and Alan Bain, “The End of Techno-Critique: The naked truth about 1:1 laptop initiatives and educational change,” The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment 9, no. 6 (Jan. 2010): 9.
[4] Quoted by Laurence Raw in a guest post on the allthingslearning blog, Nov. 8 2012: http://allthingslearning.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/questions-questions-questions-guest-post-by-laurence-raw/
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Making Sense of Math
Comments Off on Making Sense of MathWhen I meet new people they often ask what I do for a living. When I tell them I am a high school math teacher they often either change the subject, looking at me like I must be a genius from a foreign planet, or they launch into a story about how horrible their high school math courses were. Both scenarios put me on edge. I am tired of both reactions. It’s time we all got over how bad math was then and instead focus on how great it can be now.
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Summer School Gets R.E.A.L.
Comments Off on Summer School Gets R.E.A.L.As an elementary school principal, Bruce Grady knew students in Grades 4, 5, 6 and 7 identified as academically at-risk by his School District 42 in Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows, B.C.
Later, as district principal with the same district and responsible for its summer school program, he saw the same students, now in Grades 8, 9 and 10, show up in July for the remedial instruction they required to return to class in the fall.
“There was no success for those students, who every year were being identified as at-risk,” he says.
In 2012, school district officials decided to break the cycle. They reinvented summer school, introducing inquiry-based learning and various strategies to reconnect students with school. First-year results were positive: high student attendance at summer school, improved academic performance in the fall semester and increased awareness by teachers of the value of bonding with students.
To set up the new program, the district recruited eight teachers from its six high schools to design and teach a 20-day summer program for Grade 8 and 9 students from across the district who had failed one or more core academic courses. Six teachers worked directly with “pods” of students, while another acted as counselor and field trip coordinator and the eighth oversaw 12 high school and post-secondary students hired as extra-curricular activity assistants and mentors.
Of the 149 participants, 23 had identified learning disabilities but were able to function independently.
Known as “Get R.E.A.L.” – for resilient, engaged, active learning – the project aimed to put the fun back in school and equip students with skills to give them staying power for their return to class in the fall.
On the first day, students took part in team-building exercises with each other and their teachers. Over the course of the three-week program, teachers took students on three field trips – one a rain-soaked canoe trip – designed to promote inquiry-based learning and build confidence.
By the second week, teachers heard an unexpected complaint: students wanted more time for their academic work. “It blew us away that they said, ‘We want to cut down on fun activities to do more work’,” says Math and Science teacher Tom Levesque. “The work they were doing was not typical of the work they had done all year. They were doing the curriculum in a different manner and they were buying into it.”
The core of the students’ studies was a project inspired by a National Geographic video on world population growth. Students were to explore what they would need to survive as members of a new civilization on another planet, an exercise that required they apply math and science, research and writing skills to learn about past civilizations and imagine those of the future.
There were no textbooks – a negative symbol of rote learning and past academic failure for some students.
Instead, armed with apps on iPads and laptops, students examined the survival theme from the perspective of their subject disciplines and kept a portfolio (print or digital) to document what they had learned, and reflect on their own progress. Discovery-based inquiry allowed students to pursue their own ideas about a post-Earth civilization while meeting the requirements of the provincial curriculum.
“We were working with kids so they could see that learning can be fun, not just rote work, reading, writing and textbooks, and that learning can be physical,” says Mr. Grady.
Every day, students selected from a menu of extra-curricular activities.
When teacher Trevor Takasaki noticed that a lot of students rode bicycles without functioning brakes, he set up a workshop on bike repairs. This informal setting helped him get to know the students as individuals as they acquired expertise of interest to them. “They learned to be more confident on a broad range of things,” says Takasaki, an English teacher in Maple Ridge for the past decade. “Doing sports activities, bicycle repair and cooking, they started to realize they could have success in the school environment.”
For 16-year-old Dusty Cooper, Get R.E.A.L was a stark contrast to his two previous summer school experiences, “where you just had work.” He enjoyed the extra-curricular activities and not having to make notes from a textbook. “It was pretty cool to get to work with electronic equipment other than a textbook,” says Dusty, who had never used an iPad.
At the summer school, adapted life-skills and behaviour support teacher Erin Talbot did not have Dusty as a student. But they still developed an informal relationship over the summer that carried over into the next school year, when she was one of his advisors at Thomas Haney Secondary School.
A Grade 10 student who previously skipped school, Dusty completed most of his assignments over the past academic year, says Talbot. “He has been really successful with his courses and has a wonderful rapport with all his teachers,” she adds. “Summer school gave him that opportunity to build resiliency and build that confidence in himself.”
A self-described shy student, Dusty went on all the field trips, including a challenging tree-climbing course that took him 60 feet up into the trees. “I am sort of afraid of heights,” he says. “I discovered I could push the limits a little bit.”
Ray Cooper, Dusty’s father, says he sees a big change in his son since his summer school experience. “He is happier and not anxious about going to school.”
The teachers made their own discoveries.
The absence of textbooks “forced me not to rely on the old normal,” says Tom Levesque. “I had to think of new ways I could get across the same concepts without saying, ‘turn to page whatever.’” No longer in the role of information disseminator, Levesque became a facilitator, helping students use their iPads and laptops to study the solar system, a unit in the Science course. “I had so much more one-on-one contact with students,” he says.
Trevor Takasaki says teaching summer school was “a huge boost for all of us teachers, myself included, in the excitement we have in teaching.” He says the experience reinforced his belief in engaging with students to help them succeed. “It has definitely pushed us to recognize the need for the same sort of relationships [during the school year],” he says.
In 2012, a district analysis found that 137 of 145 students (four opted out) earned one or more course credits, a higher ratio than for traditional summer school. In the fall 2012 semester, 57 percent of summer school students now in either Grade 9 or 10 were doing well enough not to need further remedial help.
In summer 2013, the school district expanded the program to include 17 students from Grade 7 and 81 from Grade 10, along with 139 from Grades 8 and 9.
“It says to me that some of our kids are re-engaged,” says Grady. “They have the potential and the intelligence and the tools to be successful.”
Photo: Sue Beyer
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – En 2012, un conseil scolaire de la Colombie-Britannique a réinventé les cours d’été des élèves en 8e et en 9e année, offrant des activités en classe et parascolaires pour rehausser leur résilience à titre d’apprenants actifs engagés. Le programme « Get R.E.A.L. » du School District 42 à Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows a utilisé l’apprentissage par investigation et d’autres stratégies afin que les élèves renouent avec l’école. Au lieu de cahiers d’exercices, les élèves se sont servis d’iPads et d’ordinateurs portables pour effectuer leurs recherches et bâtir un portefeuille de réalisations au cours du programme de trois semaines.
Les résultats de la première année ont été positifs : taux de fréquentation élevé des cours d’été, résultats scolaires améliorés au semestre d’automne et sensibilisation accrue des enseignants à la valeur de l’établissement de liens avec les élèves.
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Leading the Way
Comments Off on Leading the WayOnce again this November we are dedicating an entire issue of Education Canada to educational innovation. In its pages, you will read about some truly exciting and creative new initiatives, and also grapple with how and why successful innovations do (or more often, don’t) become widely adopted, and the fears that hold us back from meaningful change.
But why is innovation and change needed in the first place? After all, Canada does very well on international measures of educational achievement. And there are certainly educators and policymakers who believe we need more standardization and traditional instruction, not “experiments” and “fads.”
There are many cogent and compelling big-picture arguments about why we need to change our game when it comes to educating children and youth. You’ll find many of them in this issue. But for me, a friend’s September Facebook post spoke just as eloquently about the need for innovation in our schools:
“My grandson, Logan’s, first day of school today: Junior Kindergarten. I asked him what he wants to be when he grows up and he told me, ‘A tiger.’ I hope formal education doesn’t beat the creativity out of him.”
No teacher aspires to “beat the creativity” out of children. As educators, we all want to nurture students’ curiosity and love of learning, to open young minds, not shut them down. But not all students blossom at school. For too many children, school is an experience in disempowerment and frustration that actually deters them from learning. Let’s be honest: we’ve all seen it happen.
On an individual level, it’s simply heartbreaking to see a child enter the system wide-eyed and eager to learn, and leave it discouraged, disinterested or having completely given up. On a sociological level, it’s a waste of human potential that we can’t afford. In a world that’s changing as fast as ours is, with challenges threatening our very survival, we need every creative, outside-the-box thinker we can get. We need citizens who know how to keep learning throughout their lives and can confidently create their own learning paths. We need problem-solvers who can cross disciplines and cultures with ease. We need some of the very people our education system is failing.
On p. 24, CEA President Ron Canuel points out that our current educational system has its roots in the Industrial Age, when consistent standards and uniform approaches – not innovation – were the priorities. As we transition into the Information Age, will education struggle to keep up – or lead the way?
Write to us!
Send your letters or article proposals to editor@cea-ace.ca, or post your comments on the online version of Education Canada at www.cea-ace.ca/educationcanada
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
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Stop the Madness of Blindly Dumping Technology into Classrooms
Comments Off on Stop the Madness of Blindly Dumping Technology into ClassroomsPlease, let’s get passed the useless debate about whether or not we should have technology in school. It must become the norm. No question. Kids are extremely plugged-in and engaged outside the classroom while increasingly, they’re tuning out in the classroom. If the purpose of education is to prepare these children for today’s world, we’re already behind the eight ball.
If you’re facing the challenge of making significant and sound technology investments for your schools, but to simply replicate old practice, don’t do it. It’s a monumental waste of money. I’ve referred before to Seymour Papert’s drawing of a stagecoach equipped with rocket boosters to illustrate the point that “Technology being applied to an old model of learning and teaching simply doesn’t work.” There are too many educators who still think that if we keep refurbishing the stagecoach, we’ll prepare students for what they need to learn to thrive in this world. No more tweaking please! Let’s just stop the tweaking.
If you’re investing in technology to transform learning, there is an international group of educators converging on Atlanta in a couple of weeks this Dec 2-3 that can help you to truly make a difference for your students. Those of us who will be sharing our stories in Atlanta wear the battle scars of lessons learned from a legacy of classroom technology integration initiatives riddled with failure – because we worked in isolation without the benefit of learning from the successes and challenges of like-minded trailblazers. Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past and don’t think that you can do it alone. A community is waiting.
This event provides an opportunity for you to learn from an internationally renowned group of tech integration specialists such as Argentinean author and entrepreneur Alicia Banuelos (@aliciabanuelos) who will share her story of how she carried out her master plan to put all of the kids of San Luis online; Gary Stager (@garystager) is a tireless innovator and provocative speaker who will share his stories of working with hundreds of 1:1 schools around the world; the One-to-One Institute’s Leslie Wilson (@leslieawilson) and Mike Gleniak (@mgielniak) are the driving force behind the Project Red Signature Districts throughout the U.S. and have a wealth of insights and expertise to share.
Join a strong contingent of Canadian educators who will be showcasing how they’re pushing the boundaries of classroom change, such as Pierre Poulin from Montreal’s Commission scolaire de la Pointe-de-l’Île (@ppoulin), Mark Carbone from the Waterloo Region District School Board (@markwcarbone), Peter Katsionis from the Vancouver School Board (@pkatsblended), and many more.
This is inspirational learning that is worth clearing your calendar for on Dec 2-3. View the impressive program here.
We have the privilege of working with educators from all over the world who are developing exciting programs – with tremendous transformative potential – that are rarely scaled up. Brilliant well-intentioned leaders are pushing the edges of innovation in their schools by leveraging the potential of technology to enhance learning, but they are isolated from one another in a system that steadfastly values conformity, compliance, and control over creativity, risk-taking, and critical thinking.
Collectively, we must forge ahead, but those of us who are striving to transform classroom learning by effectively deploying technology are still butting heads with many pundits who argue that there is too much financial risk associated with district-wide technology integration. The real risk is continuing to prepare our students for a rapidly changing world using pen and paper. It is 2013. We’re well into an established call to action for ‘21st century learning’, but we’re still paying more lip service to the term than delivering concrete results. We can’t keep preparing our kids for 1991. It is nothing less than malpractice.
Please note that CEA’s Atlanta event partners (One-to-One Institute and Lausanne Learning Institute) have previously distributed portions of this blog post -
Building Bridges with Indigenous Learners
Comments Off on Building Bridges with Indigenous LearnersAs a student embarking into the sciences more years ago than I care to admit, I fell in love with the periodic table. For me it was a metaphor for life and living. The relationships and inter-relationships spoke to me of human engagement and interaction, the results of such interactions leading to a myriad of potential products. As a student it all came together in the lab, when I experienced the chemistry in a hands-on way. To me, understanding where it fit in the real world was critical because then it had context, relevance and application and it really counted.
In his interview Re-thinking Curriculum and Pedagogy, Ted Aoki1 talks of “curriculum-as-lived” in contrast to “curriculum-as-taught,” and how the two often differ. I believe for many Aboriginal students in the current Eurocentric-based Western education system, this is the challenge: connecting the curriculum as taught with the curriculum as lived. It’s an even greater challenge because their lived experience is a different paradigm from the Eurocentric-based Western education system.
As an oral culture, Aboriginal knowledge is not held in textbooks, but rather is held by cultural experts such as elders, in ceremony, and in traditional practices. It is passed on (taught) through story, narrative or demonstration and learning is by doing.2 The laboratory for Aboriginal peoples is the real and applied world. This juxtaposition in ways of knowing and coming to learn is, I believe, key to the challenges many Aboriginal students experience in the Western education system. Context and relevancy are critical and without those, understanding is nearly impossible.
For my Master’s degree, I developed a narrative periodic table,3 in which each of the elements and their interaction with each other was illustrated with a short story. Those who read my stories would often tell me how it enabled them to understand a particular concept by putting it into a context they understood. Teachers would often ask for the stories to read to their class. So I began using narrative in my own teaching practice, and would demonstrate a concept with a mini-skit involving the students. Their favourite was when I demonstrated the difference between ionic and covalent bonds in terms of attraction to another person, dating and commitment – topics that were the focus of their current adolescent life. In thinking about the various chemical reactions, they became very creative in their own scenarios. It was easy to expand to concepts such as bond-breaking, with a jealous girlfriend as the contaminant who breaks up a relationship. Various scenarios expanded and morphed from there. I could then take those stories and further demonstrate them in the “real chemistry laboratory,” and finally in terms of pedagogical chemistry. It made for many “aha!” moments for the students. A Blackfoot student who struggled greatly with the sciences and mathematics said, “I don’t understand the textbook because I don’t know what most of the words mean. It helps when you explain it first with something that makes everyday sense to me so I can see the relationship.”
The concept of teaching through “acting,” a methodology specifically known as performative inquiry,4 became the foundation for a small university research grant5 I garnered to pilot this methodology as a means to engage Aboriginal students in learning science. Performative inquiry, based foundationally on relationships and inter-relationships, is a journey of “knowing, doing, being, creating.”6 While not specifically intended to be used to “put on a play” (although that can be the forum for communicating the message), it is used to enable understanding by bridging practice to theory in a practical, hands-on way – much as laboratory experiments enable the scientist to put theory into practice. Importantly, performative inquiry blurs definitive boundaries in an interdisciplinary way that enables students’ understanding. Performative inquiry allows students to understand how things work and to modify their “script” to try different approaches or scenarios. This methodology dovetails nicely with Aboriginal ways of knowing and learning, which are pedagogically based on relationships and inter-relationships, as well as with the experimental method of science, which continually makes adjustments to the parameters of an experiment to understand how it works.
I am fortunate in my position as Coordinator of the First Nations’ Transition Program (FNTP) to be able to tap into a resource of students who have successfully transitioned through the program. Connections to the neighbouring Blood Reserve high school allow me to work with a cohort of Aboriginal students with similar backgrounds and starting points. Two Blackfoot 2nd year university students, both from the community, worked as research assistants on the project. My purpose in choosing these students was to enable them to gain research experience, as First Nations students are often overlooked for such positions. Just as importantly, they were valuable mentors for our cohort. If high school students see post-secondary education success in others from the community whom they admire, they are more likely to see that possibility for themselves as well. Additionally, we had the good fortune of having experienced dance and drama academics volunteer their expertise on the project: one at the university and one nationally known performing theatre artist from the community, who was a great inspiration and mentor for the students.6
Video Clips
Get a glimpse of Michelle Hogue’s performative inquiry project, Chemistry Through Theatre, in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N00sQi6dIKU&NR=1&feature=endscreen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrEQYc8VvJI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlgHW3VUmMk
Our work took place with Grade 10 and 11 students from Kainai High School who were daunted by the prospect of having to take a chemistry course. We alternated between working at the high school and working at the university, so that the university would not seem like such a foreign place to come in the future. Of the 22 students initially registered in the pilot project, 13 stayed with the program to performance and received Science, Drama and elective course credits towards their high school diploma. Importantly, we continued to work with this cohort in a second pilot, using our culturally based performative inquiry methodology to augment and teach the curriculum of their Chemistry course.
Initially, it was our intention to use six Blackfoot Napi stories[8] to illustrate the six basic reactions of chemistry. As a result of unforeseeable circumstances as well as the readiness of the students in the time we had to work with them, it soon became evident that we had bitten off more than we could chew in this pilot. So we distilled our six stories down to three, and eventually to one longer story. The last thing we wanted for this first-time endeavour was to further turn the students off science by having it become a frustrating experience. Of the six stories we had initially selected, the students chose to continue with the story “Napi and the Rock,” one they were all familiar with growing up and that was complex enough to find and illustrate four of the six basic chemical reactions.
We chose a less-familiar version of “Napi and the Rock” to honour the family tradition of one of the students, though a number of versions were blended together to produce the final script. It was critical that the story also be embedded with Western chemistry, to build the bridges between the two paradigms. This turned out to be a very challenging process, and what looked good on paper often did not work in the performance development. There were continual rewrites to the script. For me, it was a learning experience that closely paralleled developing a lab to teach: what looks feasible on paper often does not necessarily translate to the chemistry lab, particularly if it has to be scaled to work for an entire class. I also developed a new appreciation and respect for what is involved in scriptwriting as well as in “carrying out” the script.
As already mentioned, one paramount and consequent result of the current Western education system is that Aboriginal students are expected to learn science through the White-Western way. Seldom, if ever, is the Western-educated scientist educated in Aboriginal ways of knowing. To address the issue of different paradigm views, we wanted the story to be an “educational” conversation between an elder and a scientist, both considered to be respected experts in their own culture, who come to understand the way each other sees science.
The Blood Reserve, situated on the prairie, has the beautiful backdrop of Chief Mountain, prefaced by the Belly Buttes (rolling hills), the Timbers, the Elbow River, and Cypress Hills, with the prairies in the foreground. This home of the students became the set design and is where the story takes place. Very few props were used in the set design or the performance; rather the geography of the Reserve as described above was depicted by the choreographed bodies of the students, who were also the actors of the play. Two of the less shy students became the elder and the scientist, who meet while the scientist, a chemist, is collecting specimens from the Aboriginal lands. The elder wants to know what the scientist is doing on their land. The scientist explains that he is “doing chemistry,” to which the elder explains that unlike the “science” of Aboriginal peoples, the science the “educated” scientist does destroys Mother Earth. The scientist asks the elder for an explanation of what he means by that; to him there is only one kind of science/chemistry, the one he has learned. The elder invites the scientist to “watch and learn” and the story unfolds. Through their conversation, connections between the two worldviews are made. The other characters include Napi (the trickster), coyote, rock, deer, rabbit, wind, sun, trees and nightingales. The play is comprised of six scenes, each of which morphs into the next through the dance movements of the students. A slapstick comedy “reaction” illustrates the chemistry throughout the play.
One might say this is just theatre or drama, and that is certainly a criticism I have heard many times, but this pilot project was a huge success on many levels. One of the most important outcomes was the students’ understanding of the chemistry they had learned. To assess whether the students had in fact learned any chemistry, in the final week I brought the chemistry lab to the theatre. I did each of the six basic reactions and without hesitation the students were able to identify the reaction, tell me the general formula, and give me a real-life example as well as a chemical reaction they had learned in class.
In interviews with the students, the key statements we heard over and over, were that:
- they were not afraid of science any longer;
- they gained much confidence, both in doing science and also in “being out there”;
- they felt better about themselves;
- they felt they belonged;
- they were proud of themselves;
- they believed in themselves because we believed in them;
- they wanted to do it again next term; and
- each said they saw themselves attending some form of post-secondary education, with ten of the 13 planning to attend university.
The most important take-away for me was that they wished more courses could be taught this way because “it made sense” for them.
Dufault wrote, “The chasm between non-Native and Native worldviews can be made smaller through increased awareness… both worldviews seek a balance of mind, body and spirit, but from different angles.”[9] I believe if we are aware of the “different angles,” and are willing to work with the differences in a new space, we can create bridges to enable success for Aboriginal students in science in the current education system.
Photo: Courtesy of Kainai High School
First published in Education Canada, November 2013
EN BREF – La chimie, telle qu’elle est enseignée dans le système scolaire occidental, rebute et exclut les élèves autochtones, dont la vision du monde est différente et qui sont généralement des personnes visuelles qui apprennent par la pratique et par l’expérience. Pour mettre les sciences à la portée des élèves autochtones et favoriser leur réussite, les éducateurs doivent explorer des techniques pédagogiques différentes intégrant les modes autochtones d’apprentissage et d’acquisition de connaissances. Appliquant une méthodologie d’acquisition de connaissances par la performance, ce projet pilote a abordé l’enseignement des sciences en créant des liens entre les sciences autochtones et occidentales, adoptant une approche théâtrale et visuelle intégrant la danse, le conte, la vidéo et la musique comme outils pédagogiques. Un conte traditionnel des Pieds-noirs (« Napi et la roche ») et les six réactions chimiques de base ont constitué la pédagogie de base de ce projet théâtral de chimie. Les élèves ont développé des compétences et des connaissances interdisciplinaires et ont établi des liens entre les concepts scientifiques de ces deux paradigmes.
1 “Rethinking Curriculum and Pedagogy: Interview with T. Aoki,” Kappa Delta Phi Record 35, no.4 (1999): 180-1.
2 See G. S. Aikenhead
3 Michelle M. Hogue, The Chemistry of Education: A periodic relationship (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Lethbridge, 2004).
4 L. Fels and G. Belliveau, Exploring Curriculum: Performative inquiry, role drama, and learning (Vancouver, B.C.: Pacific Educational Press, 2008).
5 CAETL Teaching Development Grant, “Chemistry Through Theatre” (University of Lethbridge, 2011). The second pilot was funded by an internal Social Sciences and Humanties Research grant (SSHRC).
6 L. Fels, “In the Wind Clothes Dance on a Line,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 14, no. 1 (1998): 29.
7 Dr. Lisa Doolittle, a Fine Arts professor from the University of Lethbridge and Troy Twigg, a Blackfoot choreographer and performance artist from the Centre for Indigenous Theatre and York University.
8 Napi stories are Trickster stories in the Blackfoot culture intended to teach young children various life lessons. Blackfoot children grow up with these stories, much as children of the dominant culture grow up with fairy tales, so, they were a good cultural starting point.
9 Y. Dufault, A Quest for Character: Explaining the relationship between First Nations teachings and “character education” (master’s thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 2003).
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We Must Help Education Grow Forwards
Comments Off on We Must Help Education Grow ForwardsThis content has been re-posted from Janet Lauman’s Blog at: http://jmlauman.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/whats-standing-in-the-way-of-change-in-education/
I was fortunate enough to attend the recent CEA (Canadian Education Association) conference in Calgary Alberta last week, with a team from my district (Delta – in British Columbia, Canada). I say fortunate because the question we were being asked to ponder/interrogate/delve into (What’s standing in the way of change in education?) is one of interest to many of us in education who are looking to help education “grow forwards in a positive direction”… and I am particularly interested in larger and broader educational system change.
A quote by John C. Maxwell comes to mind in regard to this, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” The key here is, as a society we are undergoing vast changes, yet in education, while there are pockets of positive forward growth, these pockets are not widespread or systemic. This perception comes to us from a variety of sources (for example the What Did You Do In School Today? data – see http://www.cea-ace.ca/programs-initiatives/wdydist)
Some of the following ideas were discussed/presented at the conference: the explosion of technology in mainstream society and how this impacts society generally and therefore meaningful experiences in schools as well (see thoughts of Charles Fadel here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHCliGPByf4), how the brain works, the importance of ethics and social/emotional learning, the impact of student engagement on the success of learning….to name a few).
Alma Harris, a leading education writer and international researcher from the UK recently wrote the following (http://t.co/AcRkExwN16). In a nutshell, she recommends that we consolidate rather than innovate in order to have successful educational reform at scale. She has a point in that educators have been engaged in the “change” conversation for a while.
At the conference there was time devoted to examining and discussing the desire to move forwards and the barriers in place making it difficult to do so. This information is being collated and will then be the focus of further discussions and hopefully action as well. I humbly suggest that a more living systems (http://summit.sfu.ca/item/11268) way of moving forwards (developing interconnected learning communities that involve individual educators, students, parents, schools, broader communities in which schools are embedded, districts, provinces…in an iterative process – more inquiry focused in nature) will be more helpful than a mandated way of moving forwards. This would allow those who are part of the education process to consolidate as needed (Harris) as well as to move forward in a way that makes sense within the particular system….to encourage continuous positive growth. (Halbert & Kaiser’s Spirals of Inquiry For equity and quality [2013] is a good Canadian source in regard to positive growth using an inquiry stance.)
In moving forwards, it is important to not destroy those patterns that are helpful (life giving). The following words from Capra are illustrative of this notion within a living systems lens.
I shall argue that the key to a comprehensive theory of living systems lies in the synthesis of two very different approaches, the study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern). In the study of structure we measure and weigh things. Patterns, however, cannot be measured or weighed; they must be mapped. To understand a pattern we must map a configuration of relationships. In other words, structure involves quantities, while pattern involves qualities. The study of pattern is crucial to the understanding of living systems because systemic properties, as we have seen, arise from a configuration of ordered relationships. Systemic properties are properties of a pattern. What is destroyed when a living organism is dissected is its pattern. The components are still there, but the configuration of relationships among them–the pattern–is destroyed, and thus the organism dies. (p. 81, 1996)
While my words above do not explore all that was discussed at the conference, this is what is resonating with me at this point in time. I look forward to continuing to be a part of helping education systems to move forwards in a positive, growth oriented way, and welcome the thoughts of others on this topic as well.
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Educating Our Schools
Comments Off on Educating Our SchoolsThe following is the first in a series of entries inspired by CEA’s What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education event, held October 21-22 in Calgary. As a member of the facilitation team, I did not have the opportunity to fully participate in all of the rich and engaging conversations that took place around the room, but I am looking forward to using the vision statements, table reports and artifacts collected from the event to offer one perspective on the question that inspired so many to participate.
JEAN BRODIE: To me, education is a leading out. The word education comes from the root “ex,” meaning “out,”and “duco…”I lead.”
To me, education is simply a…a leading out…of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.HEADMISTRESS: I had hoped there might also be a certain amount of putting in.
JEAN BRODIE: That would not be education, but intrusion…from the root prefix “in,” meaning “in,” and the stem “trudo…” “I thrust.”
Ergo, to thrust a lot of information into a pupil’s headThere’s an important nugget of truth in this bit of dialogue between the young, creative heroine and her principal in Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It’s a truth that, no doubt, resonates with many of us who actively participate in conversations about school change. And it’s a truth that was certainly winding its way through many of the table group discussions that took place this week when the Canadian Education Association convened over 300 educators, students, parents, political leaders, system administrators and members of both related profit and not-for-profit groups from across the country in Calgary. For me, it’s a truth that directs our attention to one of the most essential points around which the question that inspired the event turns: What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education?”
I”m not suggesting that we need to take a this or that approach to the conversation about the purpose of schools, but I do think that Miss Jean is right in pointing out that we need to be careful about how and when we use the term education. I would go even further by predicting that, if Miss Brodie were to visit a typical Canadian public school next week, she would be forced to observe that much of what is happening there is more intrusive than it is educational. In fact, I would argue that our schools aren’t designed to honour the fact that students—and, increasingly, teachers, bring much of anything to the table.
Consider, for example, the way that curriculum is designed and organized. The lock-step set of expectations that become the law of the classroom for most Canadian educators doesn’t leave a whole lot of space for drawing out the interests, talents and passions that lie deep within the souls of students or teachers. Think about the way that physical space is arranged. The one-teacher-to-many-students classroom, complete with standard seating, relatively small space allocations are accompanied by the underlying belief that real teaching should be centered on instruction rather than construction. It becomes a challenge to imagine many alternatives. Oh, some have been successful in accepting that challenge, (Read the story of change that Calgary teacher, Deirdre Bailey shared at the CEA event) but, to a large extent, they are considered outliers.
The reality is that practically every aspect of schooling has been designed for putting in rather than leading out. And that is why I think that this could very well be where our conversations about change need to turn. The most basic assumption that we make about the educational quality of our schools is not one that we’re accustomed to having. But I would be willing to bet my pension on the fact that, unless we’re willing to grapple with it in all of its depth and thorniness, we’re not going to get very far.
What would it look like if a school were deeply committed to valuing what its students and teachers brought into the building every day? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? How might it be organized in terms of time and space? What new roles and relationships would be necessary if this commitment were going be supported? What assessment practices might find a home in this place of leading out? How would long- and short-term planning be different? What new alliances might be formed with the community? What would the role of parents be?
These are all questions that you’ve likely heard before, but how might the responses be different if we turned our attention away from the strategies and processes designed to filling minds rather than divining what might already be there in the lives, minds and, as Miss Jean suggests, the souls of all learners, both young and old(er)? What might the results be if our schools became more…well…educated? Instead of thinking of what additional things we can put into the system, how can we build a vision for our schools that somehow enabled what is there in terms of human capital and capacity to be drawn out in a way that enlivened learning?
Over the past several years, the Canadian Education Association has joined others in pointing to strong evidence that we need to think about schools differently. We heard from students in Imagine a School and What Did You Do in School Today? We heard from teachers in the Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach initiative, and we’re beginning to hear from school administrators in Leading the Way You Aspire to Lead. This past week, over 300 passionate and informed Canadians gathered in Calgary to begin moving to take what we’ve learned to the next level.
It is relatively easy to identify the things that stand in the way of change in education. It is more difficult to zero in on the reasons why these barriers seem to be so stubborn. The opening snippet of dialogue from Muriel Sparks points to one way to deepen the conversation even more. For me, it represents that central core of the discussion around which everything else turns!
I have a feeling that we’re about to move closer to that centre!
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Let’s Ban the Binder
Comments Off on Let’s Ban the BinderHas your hand ever cramped up while copying notes into a binder? Do you remember the days when you had to create title pages? Did it matter whether you neatly underlined the date on each page? Can you recall having to study from handwritten notes in preparation for an exam? While binders, refill paper, and writing utensils have comprised the standard learning toolkit for many decades now, these very tools are among the most significant barriers to the change that will one day modernize our schools.
Has your hand ever cramped up while copying notes into a binder? Do you remember the days when you had to create title pages? Did it matter whether you neatly underlined the date on each page? Can you recall having to study from handwritten notes in preparation for an exam? While binders, refill paper, and writing utensils have comprised the standard learning toolkit for many decades now, these very tools are among the most significant barriers to the change that will one day modernize our schools.
Nothing says 20th century learning like the 3-ring binder. For decades, this tool has been the cornerstone of learning. Even dressed up as a cross-curricular ‘Trapper-Keeper’, the purpose of a notebook has been to collect and organize the static knowledge and information deemed most important by the teacher. Whether used to maintain notes, to organize photocopied handouts, or to collect assignments, the state of one’s binder has commonly mirrored a learner’s eventual academic achievement.
In the 1960’s and 70’s the essential aspects of a course were copied from the chalkboard; in the 1980’s and 90’s critical points were copied from the overhead projector; since the turn of the century, keynotes have been copied from slideshow presentations. Primarily meant as an aid to learners preparing for the written test, the act of recording notes on paper by each student in a classroom is a time vacuum that anchors us to arcane paradigms of learning. It’s time to take such past practices to task. (Can you say that five times fast?)
If we value design thinking, project-based learning, and co-construction, then an investment in multimedia portfolios should replace the act of recording notes.
If we care about rich tasks, multimedia products, and digital footprints, then the exploration of modern tools ought be emphasized beyond time spent reviewing notes in preparation for unit tests.
It we wish to honour students with a curriculum guided by choice, challenge, and collaboration, then we need to abandon the practice of recording identical notes into each student’s three-ring binder.
If we believe that creativity is more important than regurgitation, that inventiveness is of greater value than memorization, that learning is more experiential than observational, then we must engage students in thinking beyond pen, ruler and paper.
The future of education is unbound. Modern learning cannot be captured on a page, between the covers of a binder, or within the walls of a classroom. If teaching and learning are to reflect the shared, open, hyper-connected nature of learning, then the retirement of the binder could be the first brave step towards modernizing our practice.
While the removal of traditional tools like notebooks, binders and pencils might be seen as disruptive, I see the replacement of these tools with collaborative practices and digital tools as ‘eruptive’. By leveraging handheld devices, cloud tools, and collaborative learning practices, the modern ‘wiki-fied’ notebook has the potential to change school-based learning as we know it.
It is our comfort with the past is that delays us from making advances in learning. Older siblings, parents, grandparents, and practically every teacher on the planet will recognize the school binder as the prime artifact of learning. Because of that, it will be the intrepid among us who will are the first to retire the binder. The experiences of contemporary learners in newly unbound learning spaces will be remarkable – unrecognizable to past generations of learners. The time has come. Let’s ban the binder.
This blog post is part of a series of thoughtful responses to the question: What’s standing in the way of change in education? to help inform CEA’s Calgary Conference on Oct 21-22, (#CEACalgary2013) where education leaders from across Canada will be answering the same question. If you would like to answer this question, please tweet us at: @cea_ace
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Do good grades in high school guarantee post-secondary success?
Comments Off on Do good grades in high school guarantee post-secondary success?CEA and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) have teamed up to provide you with relevant and timely information based on current empirical educational research. The primary goal of this project is to get relevant and needed research into the hands of parents and other interested people. They are written in plain language on topics of interest to parents, such as homework and class size.
The Facts on Education Series is produced with a generous sponsorship from the Canadian School Boards Association.
References
Belfield, C. R., & Crosta, P. M. (2012). Predicting success in college: The importance of placement tests and high school transcripts. (CCRC Working Paper No. 42). New York, NY: Community College Research Center, Columbia University.
Chow, H. P. H. (2010). Predicting academic success and psychological wellness in a sample of Canadian undergraduate students. Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 8(2), 473-496.
Colert, S. (1983). High school equivalency and high school diploma students at Brandon University: A comparison of academic success. (GED Research Brief No. 5).
Cyrenne, P., & Chan, A. (2012). High school grades and university performance: A case study. Economics of Education Review, 31(5), 524-542
Dooley, M. D., Payne, A. A., & Robb, A. L. (2011). Understanding the determinants of persistence and academic success in university: An exploration of data from four Ontario universities. Toronto: ON: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
Geiser, S., & Santelices, M. V. (2007). Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. (Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.6.07).Berkeley, CA: Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley.
Lennon, M. C., Zhao, H., Wang, S., & Gluszynski, T. (2011). Educational pathways of youth in Ontario: Factors impacting educational pathways. Toronto, ON: Higher Educational Quality Council of Ontario.
Parker, J. D. A., Hogan, M. J., Eastabrook, J. M., Oke, A., & Wood, L. M. (2006). Emotional intelligence and student retention: Predicting the successful transition from high school to university. Personality and Individual Differences, 41(7), 1329-1336. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.04.022
Parker, J. D. A., Summerfeldt, L. J., Hogan, M. J., & Majeski, S. A. (2004). Emotional intelligence and academic success: Examining the transition from high school to university. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(1), 163-172. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(03)00076-X
Penner, A. J. (2011). Comparison of college performance of general education development (GED) and high school diploma students in Nova Scotia and PEI. (No. SP-978-01-11E). Gatineau, QC: Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.
Robbins, S. B., Lauver, K., Le, H., Davis, D., Langley, R., & Carlstrom, A. (2004). Do psychosocial and study skill factors predict college outcomes? A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 130(2), 261-288. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.130.2.261
Scott, S. (2007, August 30th, 2007). Do grades really matter? Maclean’s on Campus. Retrieved from oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2007/08/30/do-grades-really-matter/
Sparkman, L. A., Maulding, W. S., & Roberts, J. G. (2012). Non-cognitive predictors of student success in college. College Student Journal, 46(3), 642-652.
Stone, D. C. (2010). High to low tide: The high-school-university transition. In W. A. Wright, M. Wilson & D. MacIsaac (Eds.), Collected essays on learning and teaching, volume III (pp. 133-139). Hamilton, ON: Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
Toope, S. (2012, Friday, January 27, 2012). UBC looks beyond high school grades to determine if students are ready for admission. Vancouver Sun.
Trilling, B., & Fadel, C. (2009). 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
Wintre, M. G., & Yaffe, M. (2000). First-year students’ adjustment to university life as a function of relationships with parents. Journal of Adolescent Research, 15(1), 9-37.
Wintre, M., Dilouya, B., Pancer, S., Pratt, M., Birnie-Lefcovitch, S., Polivy, J., & Adams, G. (2011). Academic achievement in first-year university: Who maintains their high school average? Higher Education, 62(4), 467-481. doi: 10.1007/s10734-010-9399-2
Working Group on Student Success. (2006). Promoting student success: Shared goals, shared responsibilities. (Final Report). Halifax, NS: Saint Mary’s University.
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Brave Educators Possess an Inquisitive Nature to Pursue Change
Comments Off on Brave Educators Possess an Inquisitive Nature to Pursue ChangeOur traditions characterize our lives with meaning and structure, providing a foundation on which we can depend. We treasure the security they provide because we know what to expect. They also provide opportunities to build memories that begin to define us and bring us closer to others. Of course, this is an ideal situation; some traditions make us cringe when we anticipate certain gatherings and the memories that are just waiting to be made.
When we think of our childhood and adolescent years, where are most of our memories made? I would challenge you to think back to your own experiences of school, your day-to-day lessons, your difficulties and successes. I would also challenge you to think of the advice you received from your parents before you went to school. Was their advice based on their own experiences? Do you now have children, and is your advice based on your memories at school?
Technology is captivating the attention of many brave educators, and is beginning to upset the balance in the world of school. Our established tradition is starting to become unsettled as it begins to evolve, as small pockets of ‘teacher learners’ take a second look at the system in which they nurture young minds each day.
Have our memories and expectations of school begun to define it as a tradition? If so, the tradition of school has achieved a status that is difficult to question simply because of its hallowed perception within our society. So many people have experienced the very same lessons year after year, resulting in a mass understanding of what school should be.
Most people don’t change unless they have to. If we’re not given a reason why we have to disrupt our daily routine, sometimes we’ll put it off until it’s absolutely necessary. To counter this, I want to be sure to mention those who don’t wait – those who are curious. Curiosity is distracted from normality and is captivated by something new. Brave people not only possess an inquisitive nature, but they also pursue new possibilities with a fervour that may upset the balance of what is ordinary and expected.
Technology is captivating the attention of many brave educators, and is beginning to upset the balance in the world of school. Our established tradition is starting to become unsettled as it begins to evolve, as small pockets of ‘teacher learners’ take a second look at the system in which they nurture young minds each day.
To allow for this change to continue, support must be provided to those who are willing to follow their curious nature. It is difficult for a teacher to explore new possibilities in education without having a team to provide guidance and reassurance. In fact, an educator who questions the norm may feel like they’re sticking their neck out, risking their pride for the sake of their questions, experiments and attempts to work in a new way.
Change is well within reach if enough support is provided for those who search for new possibilities in education. Bit by bit, they will be driven to share their discoveries with others, building on new knowledge, making new memories, and challenging the traditions and expectations of the past.
This blog post is part of a series of thoughtful responses to the question: What’s standing in the way of change in education? to help inform CEA’s Calgary Conference on Oct 21-22, (#CEACalgary2013) where education leaders from across Canada will be answering the same question. If you would like to answer this question, please tweet us at: @cea_ace
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Another Brick in the Wall
Comments Off on Another Brick in the Wall
It is not a simple answer. Nor is it a simple question!
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Stop Asking For Permission to Change
Comments Off on Stop Asking For Permission to ChangeOften the things that we believe to be obstacles before us actually lie within us. This is an idea I’ve wrestled with for much of my career in public education and rests at the core of my belief about why change is such a difficult process in our field.
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Change in the Trenches
Comments Off on Change in the Trenches“You were great, you treated us with respect!” a colleague told me a few months after I had participated in a professional development day. I had been the last presenter in a series and had to change the mood since the previous speakers talked AT the audience and were called on it.
“Thanks so much.” I said. “Do you remember what my portion of the day was about”?
“No.” she said somewhat sheepishly. (It was about the power of formative assessment).
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