Archive
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Cdn EdWire – Old Math vs. New Math
Comments Off on Cdn EdWire – Old Math vs. New MathNew math equals trouble, education expert says – CBC
Methods for teaching grade school math don’t add up: Study – Postmedia
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Bossism in Public Education
Comments Off on Bossism in Public EducationIn my last blog post, I railed against excessive centralization of public education using Ontario as an example. Now it’s time to flesh out some details.
When I taught an education course at Queens University in the 1970s, I made frequent reference to the Ontario Education Act and had a copy in hand which I quoted sparingly – thus to minimize boredom. Recently, I scanned two new books about Ontario school law compiled by Jennifer Trepanier. She reveals that the current act (2010) and regulations fill up 1,200 pages of legalistic prose. This, presumably, is to be read carefully by the functionaries of the system (central bureaucrats and local administrators, political advisors, school board members, school superintendents, principals, guidance teachers, and other interested parties).
In earlier years, the purpose of the Act was to make clear that the Minister of Education, a politician, was the top dog in all matters of public education in the province. There were lots of regulations but – and this is the critical point – there was ample room for interpretation at the board and classroom levels. Not anymore. The age of monkey-see monkey-do in public education is upon us.
Here are a few examples of legislative/regulatory overkill in recent years:
- The Minister may establish a code of conduct governing the behaviour of all persons in school. Every board shall establish policies and guidelines with respect to the conduct of persons within the board’s jurisdiction and the policies and guidelines must address such matters and include such requirements as the Minister may specify. A board may direct the principal of a school to establish a local code of conduct consistent with the provincial code. These codes must set out clearly what is acceptable or unacceptable for all members of the school community (e.g. parents, students, staff, visitors, volunteers).
- Activities leading to suspension or expulsion are elaborately described as well as follow-up actions thus to ensure that the affected pupil carries on with studying the content of the approved curriculum. To that end, the school must prepare a SAP (student action plan) for pupils on long-term suspensions (11 to 20 days) or expulsions. Many, many pages of regulations are filled up with the minutiae of managing suspensions and expulsions. A principal contemplating such action against a refractory pupil would have to spend long hours studying the law and regulations lest he/she make a mistake with bad legal consequences.
These two examples with their abundant legal overtones exemplify the now-Stalinesque powers of the Minister of Education in Ontario. Presumably, other provinces and territories have cloaked the minister with comparable absolute power. The central authorities would, of course, defend this burgeoning of school law by saying that the Minister must ensure that there is consistency of treatment of pupils and teachers and parents all across the jurisdiction, that fairness and equity must be universally honoured. The question that is begged is this: Why must there be consistency in such a vast assortment of persons, places, traditions and social priorities as in Ontario? Surely the Minister should be satisfied that the elected boards respect principles of fairness and equity and, at the same time, have rules in place that respect local preferences.
My concern is that teachers on the frontline, as long as their working lives are entangled in skeins of petty provincial legal niceties, are not likely to achieve professional status. In the current circumstance, they are passive union workers adhering to the terms of the collective agreement.
Next time, I’ll offer my interpretation of teacher professionalism and explore some possibilities for its realization.
The views expressed or implied by Peter J. Hennessy are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CEA. http://www.cea-ace.ca/terms
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Poisonous Praise
Comments Off on Poisonous PraiseI find myself praising my daughter for doing absolutely nothing. She’ll be lying on her play-mat, moving her toys around and smiling and I’ll coo variations of “Oh, good girl! Aren’t you smart! What a good girl!”
According to Dweck, when I praise her for being something like a “good girl” or a “smart little baby” I am unwittingly confining her to those labels, teaching her to develop a fixed-mindset as opposed to a growth-mindset. One day, when she’s contemplating speaking out against the status quo she might keep quiet because voicing an unpopular opinion isn’t what “good girls” do. Likewise, instead of taking risks with her learning and attempting a challenging task, she might stick with the familiar, a task she knows she can tackle with success.
This is a hard habit to break. I do it with my students too.
I don’t do it in writing. I don’t deface the margins of their papers with fixed-mindset-encouraging exclamations like “Well done!” and “Great work!”
Instead, I do it to their faces, in front of others, their peers. During discussions, when students contribute their ideas I often respond, “Good idea,” or “Great, thank you.” How many learners have I silenced because they had felt uncertain about the Good-ness of their idea?
As I write this, my daughter is struggling to crawl and I watch her practice. She pushes the top half of her body into the air, but struggles to rise up to her knees. In yoga, she’d be doing the perfect cobra. I fight against the urge to praise her intelligence and strength
“Wow, Abby! You’re working so hard! Excellent effort, my girl! Good job.”
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Poisonous Praise
Comments Off on Poisonous PraiseI find myself praising my daughter for doing absolutely nothing. She’ll be lying on her play-mat, moving her toys around and smiling and I’ll coo variations of “Oh, good girl! You’re so smart! What a good girl!”
According to Dweck, when I praise her for being something like a “good girl” or a “smart little baby” I am unwittingly confining her to those labels, teaching her to develop a fixed-mindset as opposed to a growth-mindset. One day, when she’s contemplating speaking out against the status quo she might keep quiet because voicing an unpopular opinion isn’t what “good girls” do. Likewise, instead of taking risks with her learning and attempting a challenging task, she might stick with the familiar, a task she knows she can tackle with success.
This is a hard habit to break. I do it with my students too.
I don’t do it in writing. I don’t deface the margins of their papers with fixed-mindset-encouraging exclamations like “Well done!” and “Great work!”
Instead, I do it to their faces, in front of others, their peers. During discussions, when students contribute their ideas I often respond, “Good idea,” or “Great, thank you.” How many learners have I silenced because they had felt uncertain about the Good-ness of their idea?
As I write this, my daughter is struggling to crawl and I watch her practice. She pushes the top half of her body into the air, but struggles to rise up to her knees. In yoga, she’d be doing the perfect cobra. I fight against the urge to praise her intelligence and strength.
“Wow, Abby! You’re working so hard! Excellent effort, my girl! Good job.”
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The Teaching Profession: Is There Still A Place For Imagination
Comments Off on The Teaching Profession: Is There Still A Place For ImaginationImagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
—Albert Einstein
I think that we’ve come to a point in public education where we’re worried too much about the “public” and not enough about the “education”. More specifically, we’ve become far too concerned about the way our systems look from the outside that our ideas about what should be happening on the inside have become overly skewed. Consider current obsessions with test scores, international rankings and public satisfaction surveys. Each of these, in their own way, can provide some insight into how a system is doing, but to focus on them as the inspiration for the work that we do in our schools is a little like using gas consumption as the primary indicator of whether your cross-country vacation was a success.
For my blogging colleague, Peter Hennessy, some of the transformation necessary in our schools has to do with looking outwards to the power of community involvement and relationship. I agree with Peter that, teaching and learning that is somehow embedded in the reality and relevance of local communities is extremely vital to the life of authentic school communities.
Yet I continue to do great deal of thinking about the need to look inward as well, inward to the spaces and possibilities that could be created in our schools if we were to begin to honour the role of imagination and creativity. And this week, I find myself thinking specifically of this profession that I call home.
When I first began my life as a teacher, I felt a tremendous sense of freedom to bring my own personality and gifts to a fairly general set of educational aims and objectives. This is what motivated me about the work that I was beginning. I remember spending hours in the evening, on weekends and during summer months collecting ideas, creating lesson and unit ideas and dreaming up new approaches that might engage my students. Of course, many of these dreams and schemes needed to be altered once my students walked into the classroom, but that was OK; it was all part of the process.
In those days there was a sense in which a teacher’s identity was wrapped up in the way that they taught. There were teachers who were known for their use of media, others for their love of music, and others for their affinity for sports statistics.
While it could be argued that there is still room for imagination and creativity in the teaching profession, there seems to be a growing positivist approach to our professional lives. In many provinces, as much time is spent on making sure all teachers are using the same teaching approaches and strategies as we used to spend on making our teaching styles uniquely our own. Common resources have been mandated by many school districts. Databases of report card comments have served to take teacher voices out of the mix. And centralized teacher evaluation protocols, coupled with copious amounts of data collection have done a good job of ensuring that compliance trumps creativity.
The underlying narrative of the profession has shifted. We now tell the story that there is a set of truths about teaching and learning somewhere “out there”. As we speak, these truths are being discovered and collected into a massive database. Our success as teachers relies on our ability to learn and adopt these “best practices.”
That’s it, no need for innovation, no need for copious amounts of creativity and certainly no need for imagination! After all, if we’ve decided that something has been deemed “best practice”, why would we be using anything else?
Now before you get the impression that I’m on an anti-research bent, please know that I love education-based research. But my years in the classroom have also taught me that, while learning is a fairly natural part of being a human being, teaching is not. Sure, we need to listen to the experiences of those who have been this way before. We need to listen to those who have spent much of their life’s work on investigating how human beings learn and how that learning is affected and enhanced.
But I really believe that we have to drop this notion that it is possible, let alone desirable, to figure this whole thing out. In our efforts to rationalize, and even simplify the process of school-based teaching, we are losing sight of just how complex this project we call school actually is!
It’s a complexity that requires openness, a sense of adventure and a whole bunch of imagination. I’m afraid that in presenting teaching practice as a given, we’re going to dissuade a large number of people from the profession who possess the artistic sensibility and vision that we so desperately need.
Transformation must respect scientific inquiry and the accompanying rules of evidence provided by that perspective. And, I’ll even agree that some standardization of curriculum is likely a good thing. But there’s something that is being lost in our attempt to make teaching and learning a purely scientific, data-driven undertaking. And what’s being lost is the very thing that is going to help re-professionalize teaching. Our conversations need to become more infused with the language of imagination. It is in doing so that we’ll begin to find room for talk of hope, of possibility and of school systems that promote meaningful learning, civic engagement (and, yes civility) and autonomy.
And that is the type of school system that I imagine and dream about!
What about you? What is the role of imagination in the work that you do? Would you like to have more room for imagination and creativity? Do you have stories where you were led more by your imagination than your curriculum guide?
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Monkey-see…Monkey-do
Comments Off on Monkey-see…Monkey-doLast spring I wrote a series of blogs based on the proposition that our publicly supported schools should not only be in the community, but of the community. By that I meant that adolescent students approaching adulthood and the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy need to be significantly engaged in the ordinary affairs and activities of the community. I urged that 20% of the regular school time of students aged 16 to 18 should be spent in work/learning situations outside the school. Adequate staff resources would have to be provided to make it work satisfactorily both for students and community persons and organizations. An earlier blog of mine offered some practical working details.
A fellow blogger, Stephen Hurley, wrote recently about capacity building as the essential ingredient in implementing any improvement in education. In his list of “Schools are —“ statements he said this: “Schools are built on the assumption that students can effectively learn about the world by being removed from it for most of their formative years.” That statement goes to the heart of what I believe to be the most critical challenge in transforming education.
In that regard, the line that I wish to pursue for a few weeks is this: the structure of public education in North America is at odds with the needs of its clients, i.e. students and their parents. Put differently, the clients need a structure that will not only provide the skills and techniques for success in the digital age but also the attitudes and personal sensitivities for constructive citizenship in a democracy. In that respect, the typical power structure in public education is counter-productive. It is hierarchical, i.e. Minister of Education at the top, central administrators next, followed by school boards as hand maidens of the Minister, with principals and teachers serving the school board. At the bottom are students and parents dancing to the tune of the school authorities.
Of course, there must be a line of accountability satisfactory to the politicians who manage the tax revenue needed to pay for the system. What is lacking is sufficient operational flexibility at the local level to ensure that the clients (students and parents) are actively in touch with the realities of their own communities while their children are growing up. That for me would be a real environment for learning. More to come!
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Bullying: Responding to a Sad Fact of Life
Comments Off on Bullying: Responding to a Sad Fact of LifeBullying is a fact of life. It has always been so and it always will be, because bullying is part of our human nature. We see it in politics, in professional sport, in the movies and, not surprisingly, we also see it in schools – playgrounds, staff rooms and board meetings included. Aggression and dominance are a part of our make-up; it can be managed, but not eliminated.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we should accept it. What it does mean is that suppression is not an adequate response and is doomed to fail. Of course there has to be “zero tolerance” but the only constructive interpretation of this term is that we can never look away. Responding to bullying with vengeance doesn’t get at the root of the problem and therefore does not resolve it. It may push it away but it doesn’t eliminate it. The “just say no” approach is both naive and irresponsible.
There are much better ways to go. You can set clear expectations for behaviour, you can provide adequate supervision, you can teach students how to respond if they encounter bullying, you can intervene decisively if it happens and you can use restorative justice to heal, for example, but by far the best approach is to build students’ resilience.
Personal resilience is rooted in our own characteristics, of course, but also in the social environment that we construct for ourselves and others. We might refer to this as our personal network, or our community, or the social capital in our society. Schools have an important role to play in developing both students’ internal and external assets, but I want to comment particularly on the external assets – the social capital upon which students can draw.
In “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam defines social capital as “a norm of generalized reciprocity: I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.” Others might talk about Social Responsibility or the Golden Rule. Whatever you call it, what matters is how we go about creating a society in which, when bullying occurs, there is immediate, supportive and constructive response from those who observe it – both for the victim and the perpetrator.
Schools are not solely responsible for building social capital, but they have a very important role to play. In fact, the creation of social capital is one of the main reasons for having a public school system.
So how might schools go about this task? Well, simply bringing the whole community together is a very good, indeed essential, start. But then, of course, schools have to operate in ways that exemplify and inculcate the values they espouse. If they operate on the basis of “might makes right” authority in which adults claim inherent dominion over children – for their own good, of course – they are not doing that. What students learn from such an experience is quite likely the opposite of what we would hope and what they require in order to forge a civil society in the diverse and dynamic realities of the modern world.
Therefore, as part of a pro-active response to the fact of bullying and and for the greater good of society, social capital development should be high on the priority list for twenty-first century transformation. This “hidden curriculum” needs to come out of the closet and take its place beside human capital development in the discourse about school quality. Without this rebalancing of educational goals, all the focus on individual academic achievements and technological prowess may be for nought.
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Cdn EdWire: The Pros and Cons of Banning School Fundraising
Comments Off on Cdn EdWire: The Pros and Cons of Banning School FundraisingBan school fundraising, province urged – Toronto Star
Fundraising ban would hurt schools, educators say – Toronto Star
Chris Selley: How is this a public school system? – National Post
Report card: Sizing up Ontario’s education system – CTV
Three cheers for exams! GTA school credits test gains to warm-ups – Toronto Star
‘Vote against kids’ parodies attack-style ads – Toronto Star
OTHER NEWS
Canadian public school boards recruit foreign students to boost coffers –Globe and Mail
The Global Search for Education: How to Support Your Education System – Huffington Post Canada
New high school textbook aimed at aboriginal youth means business – Globe and Mail
Student surge hits Catholic system – Calgary
Extra teachers needed to handle crunch – Calgary HeraldSex workers, genital mutilation not suitable topics for children: TDSB – National Post
What news am I missing? Can you recommend some education blogs for me to follow? Please tweet me at @max_cooke, e-mail me at mcooke@cea-ace.ca or better yet, use the comment box below to suggest additional articles happening in your region so that others can check it out.
INTERNATIONAL
Where Did All the Male Teachers Go? France Worries That Boy Students May Be Suffering – Le Figaro
EDUBLOG HIGHLIGHTS
Michael Fullan and Advice on Moving Forward – Culture of Yes (Chris Kennedy)
Michael Fullan is one of the architects of the current government of Ontario’s platform on education (here), and has recently written a widely cited paper Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform, which I have previously blogged about here.While his most prominent work is with Ontario, Fullan has been working, on and off, with school districts and the Ministry of Education in British Columbia for more than twenty years as well. This past week, along with two others very involved with innovation projects around the world, Valerie Hannon and Tony Mackay, Fullan spent a full day working with school superintendents highlighting several key concepts in the context of our work in BC…
Supportive Assessment – For the Love of Learning (Joe Bower)
I often talk to teachers and parents about assessment. I simplify assessment into two steps. First you collect information about a student’s learning and then you share it with others. Collect and share. That’s it. Sounds simple, right? Well, there’s a couple caveats. First, any information collected should be done based on what students are learning while doing projects that are in a context and for a purpose.Second, the collecting and the sharing of this information should be done by the kids and not simply to them. Just like how the best kinds of learning is done by children rather than to them, the same goes for assessment…
Learner First – The Principal of Change (George Couros)
“Boredom continues to be a leading cause of our high school dropout rate.” Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement GapI was so intrigued by a video that was created by Rod Lucier’s cohort at the Learning 2.011 conference(and this reflection that you should read) this last week in Shanghai that I wanted to share it. The basics of the video show the boredom of students as they sit through the traditional lecture or “drill-and-kill” type teaching that has happened in schools. A student dreams about the opportunities for hands on learning that is interactive and collaborative. I remember sitting through these classes during my time in high school usually thinking about anything else other than what was being taught…
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It’s Not Time For Imagination?
Comments Off on It’s Not Time For Imagination?“But daddy, it’s not time for imagination!” My four year old son, Luke, was doing his best to rescue a toy that his two year old brother, Liam, had been playing with. The problem was that, according to Luke, his brother was not using the toy for its intended purpose and should, therefore, be required to give it up. I had tried to explain to Luke that Liam was using his imagination and had come up with a different way of playing. Needless to say, my reasoning didn’t wash—at least not with Luke.
In a recently posted CEA video, John Ralston Saul has some rather poignant things to say about what we sacrifice when our school systems are focused on efficiency, managerialism and content over form. And while authentic intelligence is held up by Ralston Saul as being one of the victims of the rather utilitarian model of education that has been taken shape around us, I would argue that imagination has suffered as well.
And, you know, it makes total sense.
Think back to the opening conversations that you’ve had in your schools and district offices this year. Have they been more focused on strategies for increasing test scores, or on ways of creating engaging and exciting learning environments for students? Have they been more concerned with mitigating risk through policy statements and rules, or with ways of encouraging entrepreneurship and intellectual risk-taking? Have they been more centered on assessment and evaluation, or on fostering real and powerful learning in our students and teachers?
More and more the priorities and values that are promoted in our public schools push to the side the types of energy and thinking that are going to make real differences in the ability of public education to prepare students for dynamic citizenship in the 21st century. More and more, we’re saying to our students and our teachers, “It’s not time for imagination.”
Imagination and creativity cannot simply be inserted into our school systems as a “value-added” feature. It’s not about developing a curriculum that teaches imagination, and its certainly not about creating a box on the report card that accounts for imaginative thinking.
No, imagination must become part of the culture of the way we look at schools and the work of education in Canada. It needs to be infused into the discourse used by policy-makers, administrators, teachers and students. Public will and resolve can open up the space for a shift in the types of conversations that are considered valuable in our 21st century schools. Imagination can help us to keep those spaces open!
Have you encountered a shift towards thinking of schools from a more imaginative perspective? In what areas of school practice do you see room for the infusion of imaginative thinking? What could imaginative thinking look like in your school context?
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Motivation and Autonomy
Comments Off on Motivation and Autonomy“A man stands in front of a tank in China.” Families stand in the streets for days in Egypt. And, on a different scale, children everywhere contemplate running away from home when denied a later bedtime / another cookie / a sought-after toy. In Drive Daniel Pink makes the case that the longing – and sometimes fight – for autonomy is part of what makes us human. He defines autonomy as the desire to have control over a task, our time, our technique and our environment (including deciding who is on our team).
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Cdn EdWire: With Students Back in Classrooms, Education Media Kicks into High Gear
Comments Off on Cdn EdWire: With Students Back in Classrooms, Education Media Kicks into High GearCLASSROOMS
Video in the class keeps savvy students engaged – Globe and Mail
It’s back to school for cellphones in Toronto – Globe and Mail
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Hockey Riots and Public Education
Comments Off on Hockey Riots and Public EducationThe special report into the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots concluded that, “No plausible number of police could have prevented trouble igniting in the kind of congestion we saw on Vancouver streets that night.” In fact, policing can never create such harmony. It is an essential tool, but it is not the root source of the peace and order that we all desire. Civil society rests on what sociologists call the “social capital” in our culture; that is, “the information, trust and norms of reciprocity inhering in one’s social networks.” (Putnam, 2000) Without this foundation, no amount of authority or force can either create or preserve peaceful coexistence.
Social capital is created when all elements of society meet, share common experiences and learn to live with and respect each other, thus establishing norms of inclusiveness and reciprocity. Where it exists, social capital acts like a civic immune system, responding to protect the “body politic” from the anti-social behaviour of individuals and groups within it. With high social capital the need for policing decreases and when it is used it is more effective because the public actively support it. Without social capital no amount of force can impose order on a society.
In “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam explains that, “Networks of community engagement foster sturdy norms of reciprocity … [Sometimes] reciprocity is specific: I’ll do this for you if you do that for me. Even more valuable, however, is a norm of generalized reciprocity: I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road … Trustworthiness lubricates social life. Frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity.”
We hear a lot about the duty of schools to increase the life chances of students by building their personal skills. Clearly this is important, but it is equally important that schools foster the sort of civil society in which students experience the “peace, order and good government” that our constitution envisages. Schools provide not only private good for individuals but also public good for society as a whole.
This was one of the fundamental reasons for the creation of public schools. “In1829 at the founding of a community school in the bustling whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Thomas Greene eloquently expressed this crucial insight: We come from all the divisions, ranks and classes of society … to teach and to be taught in our turn. While we mingle together in these pursuits, we shall learn to know each other more intimately; we shall remove many of the prejudices which ignorance or partial acquaintance with each other had fostered … In the parties and sects into which we are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of him whom we do not in so many respects regard as brother … We may return to our homes and firesides [from the school] with kindlier feelings toward one another, because we have learned to know one another better.” (quoted in Putnam, 2000)
Assessment of school performance focuses on “human capital” (i.e., accomplished students) but seldom considers “social capital” (i.e., socially responsible citizens). The latter purpose deserves more attention. Schools cannot prevent hockey riots, but unless they do their job in building social capital, it is certain that in a diverse and dynamic world such tragedies will be more common and more severe.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
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Can You Imagine?
Comments Off on Can You Imagine?One of the comments that often appeared on my early school report cards, one that was then emphasized during parent-teacher interviews, had to do with my habit of getting lost in daydreams. Apparently, it was not uncommon for me to zone out during regularly scheduled classroom lessons, returning to “reality” only after being admonished by my teacher for not paying attention.
Photo by: mollyollyoxenfree http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollydon/5358808933/
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What Will You Open First At The Beginning of the School Year?
Comments Off on What Will You Open First At The Beginning of the School Year?Canadian thought leader, Rodd Lucier, asked me the following question last week, and it has had me thinking ever since:
“What is the first thing that will be opened on the first day of school: the textbook or the stories?”
I remember clearly preparing for the first day of school at the beginning of my career. In those days, I would spend most of August in my classroom (much to the chagrin of our caretaking staff), preparing bulletin boards, photocopying worksheets and activities, designing curriculum tasks and devising complex incentive schemes. On the very last day of summer vacation, I would spend my time arranging desks in neat arrays, making sure that pencils were sharpened and that notebooks, textbooks and name tags were on every desk. I wanted to guarantee that when students walked in on the first day of school they knew that I had been diligently working on their behalf and that I was, indeed, ready to go.
I recall those First Days of School being characterized by a great deal of talking and a great deal of listening. Looking back, however, I know that I was the one who did most of the talking, and the students did most of the listening: listening to who I was and what my expectations were; listening to me outline the rules and procedures for the year. I thought that was the way to do it. I thought that was the way to establish control, rapport and student buy-in. I thought!
Fast forward twenty five years and my current method of preparation for that first day of school:
Bulletin boards are started but not complete. A large, blank piece of butcher paper runs along one entire wall of the classroom. Tables and desks are pushed to the side and the chairs form a large circle with several pieces of wood resembling a campfire as the centerpiece. A guitar leans up against one wall. I am ready to go.
It took me too many years to realize that I had been starting off on the wrong foot! The structures and infrastructures of school, while important, are not central to what my work is all about. Textbooks, bulletin boards, notebooks and all of the other scholastic trappings that my students and I are used to hiding behind are not what are essential to the ecology of my classroom.
For me, the core of teaching and learning has become the story: my story, my students’ story, story of our community and, indeed, our world. And if it’s true that our stories lie at the core of who we are as individuals, then why not recognize that in the way I begin my school year.
Our stories connect us to one another; our stories set us apart and allow us to express our uniqueness. Our stories allow us to relive both the highs and lows of life. Our stories allow us to express our hopes, dreams and our fears.
To take the time to open up our stories is to lay the foundation for empathic relationship which, I believe, is the cornerstone of any safe and nurturing environment.
So, the bulletin boards I begin are now designed to leave room for my students’ own creativity and insight. The butcher paper that runs along my classroom wall acts as a living, breathing record of what we learn and are thinking about on a daily basis. The tables and desks are sidelined in order to encourage openness and vulnerability. And the campfire? Well, that’s my new metaphor for teaching and learning, for it’s around the campfire that the art of living is played out: in story, in song, and in dance.
The textbooks—well, they still have a place in my teaching, but they won’t be seen for a while. If you walk into my classroom on the first day of school these days, the first things that you’ll see us open up are our stories.
So, come in, grab a chair around the campfire and get ready to learn!
Note: For a powerful example of how another teacher has adopted this approach on an ongoing basis, take a look at Children Full of Life a Passionate Eye documentary released several years ago.
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Canadian EdWire – The back-to-school media crush begins
Comments Off on Canadian EdWire – The back-to-school media crush beginsBack to school: New rules help curb homework meltdowns – Toronto Star
How to curb your child’s back-to-school anxiety – Globe and Mail
The Dilemna of Paying for School Essentials – Ottawa Citizen
Photo courtesy of Caramel – http://www.flickr.com/photos/grandmaitre/2848251258/
B.C. teachers talks off to a rocky start as back-to-school looms – Globe and Mail
A crash course on the B.C. teachers’ labour dispute – Globe and Mail
OTHER NEWS
Embracing technology – Calgary
Schools are moving to integrate new devices into the educational processOntario picks up tab for new French school in Etobicoke – Globe and Mail
EDUBLOG HIGHLIGHTS
What we can learn from Canadians – The Great Debate (Reuters
There is a debate, if that’s what you can even call it, raging in America about how to improve our public education system. While disparate groups rip each other apart, it would seem wise to look to our neighbors to the north. Americans love to casually pick on Canadians, but we should be seriously analyzing their public school system, which has emerged as one of the most successful school systems in the world…Can you afford to close the door? – Doug – Off the Record (Doug Peterson)
There’s an old saying in education that goes something like this – once the students are in the classroom, you can close the door and only you and they know what happens. Whether said seriously or in jest, it can be true if you want. After all, it’s not like there are a large number of people who really want to drop into your classroom at a moment’s notice or even care what’s happening… -
Prevent Teacher ‘YouTubing’ by Giving Students More Freedom to Learn
Comments Off on Prevent Teacher ‘YouTubing’ by Giving Students More Freedom to LearnI cringe when I hear the horror stories from other teachers about how their board has banned cellphones, Facebook and YouTube. If privacy in a public classroom is the sacrifice that we have to make in order to get the educational benefit out of these devices with video capability, then by all means do it. Students need to be taught that the polite, respectful thing to do would be to ask for permission to videotape your teacher and then respect his/her wishes. It is far better to take these moments where cell phones conflict with lesson plans and teach how to better use these devices properly.
The key is reculturing ourselves to accept this technology in more ways for learning. If you’ve ever wanted to text someone during a meeting, or Google something at the dinner table to fact-check, then you’ve got a taste of what’s happening in classrooms worldwide today. Devices that connect to the internet come in all shapes and sizes and there is no way that the public school boards can attempt a 1:1 ratio of equipment to student. So we depend on students to bring their own tech. If a smartphone (or tablet or laptop) allows students to have that kind of access, then I’m all for it. Students are capable of deciding how they can use technology to improve their learning, and school needs to provide the environment to help them be productive. Instead of eliminating their technology from the classroom, we need to teach students the consequences for texting or being on Facebook. They’ll miss out on opportunities for learning, if they can’t learn to communicate well. Giving students, parents and the whole school community multiple ways to communicate will benefit everyone. This year my new Grade 9 library helper emailed me and ‘cc’ed’ her parents so that they could sync her library schedule with her parents’ Outlook calendar. Open communication with the broader community of learners that pertain to my school is my goal.
The dilemma of society learning when and how to use technology is not in saying “No” to students. The answer lies in the best teaching method in the world: give the students more choice.
The dilemma of society learning when and how to use technology is not in saying “No” to students. The answer lies in the best teaching method in the world: give the students more choice. We need to let students Tweet to each other about their geography lesson to deepen their learning, if that’s their choice. We need to let them choose how they will publish, and determine their own privacy settings. We need to teach them how. To eliminate technology from the classroom is to deny our students access to the three most important concepts they’ll ever learn: communication, collaboration and creation. It prevents them from moving forward and it prevents the greater community from moving forward with them.
Photo courtesy of Dean Shareski http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/3268690032/
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Assessment As Learning: It’s time. Seriously.
Comments Off on Assessment As Learning: It’s time. Seriously.“I’m just so afraid to take that leap,” a veteran English teacher said, to the understanding nods of others in the room.
It is a sunny Saturday and the classroom where I am presenting to a group of educators pursuing their Masters looks out onto the shining waters of False Creek. The leap the English teacher refers to is the leap I took about 5 years ago when I stopped giving my students marks and started giving them feedback instead. I have paused in my Prezi after the bit about my assessment practices so we can discuss the ideas I have just shared. I understand her fear. So do others in the group, as evidenced by the wringing of hands and pursed lips.
Many teachers still fear challenging the status quo when it comes to assessment. Sometimes a school’s leadership lacks the strength to speak against the traditional system of ranking that we now know does nothing for learning. Sometimes a community of powerful parents clings vociferously to this ranking system simply because it is familiar – after all, that’s how it was when they went to school. But here’s the rub: since they went to school, the world – the context in which we work and play – has changed in drastic and meaningful ways.
In the past couple of decades, brain research and education research has transformed our understanding of learning. If we want to offer the opportunity for success to everyone then all learners must be offered the benefits of a learning system not the damage of a ranking system. A learning system will ensure that all learners “cross the stage with dignity and options.” Our future deserves that reality, and so do the students in our classrooms right now.
Educators using assessment for learning are changing the status quo and anytime we change the status quo we face conflict. Conflict can be frightening but it doesn’t have to be paralyzing, especially with so much evidence to support us.
All of this is on the tip of my tongue as I turn to the teacher who spoke of her fear, but before I respond another teacher pipes in: “Why not compromise and use rubrics but keep numbers? I mean, we can always go halfway, right? Just give those intimidating parents what they want, but use feedback too. We don’t have to do the whole thing right off. Why not ease people into it?”
Here’s the thing. The research has been firm on the damage that marks-based systems do to learning. Once we know this, it is our moral imperative to do better. Assessment for and as learning is better.
The English teacher who spoke of her fear at shifting her assessment practice stands in the same place as many others all over the country, but the gap over which she must leap is getting smaller. More research, more practitioners’ experience, more success and more understanding make that gap smaller every day. I understand that the gap exists. But it is time to jump.
Here is an article published by Education Canada that discusses how I first jumped. Dan Meyers, an educator in California, has a presentation about how he jumped. If you’re ready to talk the logistics of your jump, please comment below! Ready… set …
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Canadian EdWire – Our Public Schools: Consumer-driven?
Comments Off on Canadian EdWire – Our Public Schools: Consumer-driven?Skateboard school or single-sex? Niche schools take off – Globe and Mail
Fight brews over petition to move prestigious education program – Toronto Star
OTHER EDUCATION NEWS
B.C.’s schools to cut optional exams, no longer required for university – Vancouver Sun
Scholarships will now be based on marks in five mandatory testsGetting ‘YouTubed’ big issue facing teachers, professors – Toronto Star
From ‘sexting’ to truancy: A world of woes for school principals – Toronto Star
Dropout chiefs imperil a generation of kids – Globe and Mail
What news am I missing? Can you recommend some education blogs for me to follow? Please tweet me at @max_cooke, e-mail me at mcooke@cea-ace.ca or better yet, use the comment box below to suggest additional articles happening in your region so that others can check it out.
INTERNATIONAL
The Missing Link in School Reform – Stanford Social Innovation Review
The Global Search for Education: More Focus on Change – Huff Post
EDUCATION BLOG HIGHLIGHTS
Further to my earlier blog recap of the UnPlug’d Canadian Education Summit, reflections of this groundbreaking event continue to pour in from the organizers and participants.
UnPlug’d 11 wasn’t perfect, it was real – Learning Together (Ben Hazzard)
The Process is the Product – The Clever Sheep (Rodd Lucier)
Why Relationships Matter – The Unplug’d Model – Pipedreams (Zoe Brannigan-Pipe)
Unplug’d 2011: The Change We Need – EnVisioned (Lorna Constantini)
Unpacking from UnPlug’d11 – Mrs. D’s Flight Plan (Headther Durnin)
Filling Your Apple Basket — The Continuous Learner (Joe Evans)
What I should have shared at #unplugd11….. – Teaching and Learning Together (Kelly Powers)
Not that kind of story – Barker Blog (Danika Barker)
Unplug’d 11 – Ramblings (Jaclyn Calder)
Unpacking, reminiscing, and wondering… Alana Learns about Educational – (Alana Callan)
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Why the UnPlug’d Canadian Education Summit Matters
Comments Off on Why the UnPlug’d Canadian Education Summit MattersA few weekends ago I had the extraordinary opportunity to participate at UnPlug’d – a PD gathering like no other. A group of deeply committed Canadian educators converged upon Toronto and rode a train to the western edge of Algonquin Park to share the aspects of teaching and learning that mattered most to them.
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Canadian EdWire – Secular schooling disputes still make news in the dog days of summer
Comments Off on Canadian EdWire – Secular schooling disputes still make news in the dog days of summerSchool board sees dueling demonstrations over Muslim prayers – Toronto Star
That secular school for Morinville? It’s still not a done deal! – Rabble.ca
Preserve equality at publicly-funded Roman Catholic schools – Globe and Mail
Family meetings, ‘tech breaks,’ encouraged to keep tabs on kids’ online activity – Winnipeg Free Press
Cuts put students’ futures in jeopardy, says new president of teachers’ group – Fredericton Daily Gleaner
What news am I missing? Can you recommend some education blogs for me to follow? Please tweet me at @max_cooke, e-mail me at mcooke@cea-ace.ca or better yet, use the comment box below to suggest additional articles happening in your region so that others can check it out.
INTERNATIONAL
Darling-Hammond: The mess we are in – Washington Post
Unschoolers learn what they want, when they want – CNN International
Government Of Jamaica Seeking To Hold Parents Accountable For Kids’ Literacy – The Gleaner
Ministry Partners with RIM to Provide Teachers with Smartphones – Jamaica Information Service
Violent protests for education reform in Chile – Globe and Mail
Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So – The Nation
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