Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.1

In Arrival City, Doug Saunders makes the claim in chapter one that certain peripheral cities, suburbs, or neighbourhoods function as transition zones for migrants. The social and economic role of these areas is to ease newcomers into an urban environment. It goes as a given then, the living conditions in these areas will be much lower than in other parts of the urban conglomeration, but still represent a step up, either in economic or social terms, than the other areas these migrants are leaving.

The problem, from an educational social reformist perspective, is how to mitigate or "raise up" the living conditions in these transition zones. But maybe, the more effective strategy is to concentrate on what happens to these zones as they build up, gaining economic and social clout, and in essence, cease acting as transition zones, forcing the urban periphery and the development of new transitions zones, further out. Perhaps this suggests we need a different idea of what a school looks like, one that encompasses a notion of different types of schools for different neighbourhoods. A school in Doug Saunders' transition zones has different social functions to fulfill than one in a more established, stabilized neighbourhood. There is a role to be played in assisting the transformation of schools from one type to another.

One of the problems with this idea however, is that the notion of different schools for different neighbourhoods also seems to suggest different learning outcomes for different neighbourhoods. The dream of educational reformers of the 1960s valued equality of outcomes for all students, regardless of locale. I'm not sure I'm ready to accept the death of that dream.

Gender Differences in Schools

I came across a very interesting article in Educational Leadership today that suggested there was very little difference between the brains of boys and girls, implying that teaching strategies aimed specifically at each gender were misguided. What was different however, was the actual difference between behaviours of boys and girls, with a notion that these behaviours are reinforced through social interactions. At one point, the author even notes that gender-specific teaching strategies might actually do more to increase differences between boys and girls than to remediate them.

You can read the full article here.

Lately I've been puzzled over what teachers in the classroom, and schools in general, ought to do when faced with two different social groups performing at different levels in different curricular areas. Under a previous philosophy of schooling, it was believed that by the end of Grade 12, every student ought to arrive at the same endpoint. If a group of students were lagging behind in certain areas, extra instruction would be required. However, given that classroom time is a finite resources, extra instruction meant less instruction in something else. The current problem, as I see it, is if social groups perform at different levels primarily because of the social interactions they engage in, both in and out of school, then I question the school's ability to offset the social behaviours that are occurring in the two-thirds of the day that a student spends not in school. In essence, I no longer believe that if outside-of-school social behaviours are the causes of different performance or achievement levels that schools can produce a scenario in which all students perform at an equal level. It seems to me that an inequality of performance is inherent. Unfortunately, if the goal of school is no longer to insure an equality of outcomes, I'm not sure what the purpose of school ought to be.

So, if girls are better readers than boys, should we make boys read more? Should we cut back on gym and math time, since these are areas that boys could use less instruction? Should we do the opposite for girls? Less reading and more math? Would this make students more willing to go to school? More likely to be engaged in their learning? In this case, the push for student engagement seems in conflict with the desire for optimal learning in all areas of the curriculum. It all seems very messy.

Hybrid online courses

An e-School news article from earlier this year suggests that students in online courses "do better" than students in traditional courses within a post-secondary context. It goes on to say that students in "hybrid" courses, that is a course that offers some form of mix between online and in-classroom activity, do best of all.

It's probably too early to call these studies definitive, but there's a lot of focus on the increase in student engagement that online courses are thought to create. Higher student engagement = increased student success.

However, I wonder about the extent to which online and hybrid courses offer students more opportunities to reflect on their learning. In the past, I have been critical of the pacing of traditional classes. Often on-campus activities are stacked back-to-back, to maximize a students time. Within the k-12 system, it is an endless conveyor belt of activitiy, with students not gaining an opportunity to rest until often well into the evening. I would like to think that part of what we are seeing in hybrid courses is the ability of students to select times to engage in online school opportunities that also (perhaps subconsciously) provides them with a period of reflection.

Jane Addams and Student Engagement

I just finished reading an essay on Jane Addams, a pioneer of early 20th Century education, who was one of the first to pay attention to multi-cultural education. While her ideas have been quite influential in that regards, I also found it very interesting the way her ideas of socialized education speak to the general isolation that stems from education. Schools not only function to isolate students from their parental ethnic cultures, but also from the daily experiential cultures that their arents partake in, most notably work culture. Schools tend to provide students with a unique cultural environment that references nothing else in the lives of students except school. Addams charged that this kind of formalism prevented children from conceiving of proper ways to integrate themselves in the adult world. This also provides a unique perspective of many so-called "GenX'ers" from the 1990s who experienced significant personal distress when it came time to enter the "real world" after graduation. In fact,the 1990s saw many developments such as the "permanent student" and record increase in graduate school enrollments, the "Slacker Movement" which encouraged well-educated middle class youths to take up menial service sector jobs such as dishwashers and parking lot attendants. Even the media's fixation on something called "the quarter-life crisis", a noticable increase in the number of students who dramatically change careers a few years after graduation, underscores that even youths who made a career choice often felt it was the wrong one.

All of this points somewhat to the circular nature of contemporary schooling, although the situation has changed somewhat. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the school setting became increasingly self-referential. Students came to school and had few options to engage in activities that were not in some way related to school. The development and increasing proliferation of personal communication devices, along with access to Internet resources has given students more options and means to carry their non-school lives with them into school. Recent student engage surveys, such as those being conducted under the What Did You Do In School Today banner, are clearly demonstrating that students recognize the isolating and divorced nature of their current situation.

The problem is time

As education budgets decline, it remain static in the face of increasing needs, school districts tend to respond by asking teachers to assume more responsibilities, ranging from increased instructional duties (teach more students in more classes) to clerical (tracking attendance, inputting student course selections), to adminsitrative (monitoring earned student credits, writing individualized student performance plans). Advances in technology has made some of this easier; teachers with computers in the classroom can enter attendance or grades directly into central systems with the students right in front of them, other advances, like email an online learning management systems, extend a teacher's responsibilities to students beyond the ringing Tod the tradional end of day bell. Currently teachers, especially new teachers, are under tremendous pressure to contribute to the culture of schools through volunteering to host extra-curricular activities, such as hosting clubs or coaching athletics, all of which occur at the margins of the school day.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for good teachers to balance teaching with other aspects of their lives. Good teachers often became involved in teaching as a way to incorporate and share passions and hobbies in a constructive way. Lengthening commitments to schools leaves less and less time for these other interests. Furthermore, many specialized teachers view themselves as members of multiple communities. A science teacher, for example, might view him or herself as a member of an educational community, as well as the larger science community. Similarly a
music teacher could have membership in the local music scene in addition to the education community. Again, participation in these other communities is made difficult by the increased demands of the school system, which often responds to these criticisms by giving teachers the option of starting a school-based club around these interests, thus involving the teacher ever more with the life of the school and increasing their professional isolation from other communities.

It is clear that teacher retention is an issue for many jurisidictioms and I would contend that a contributing factor is the inability of school systems to allow teachers to maintain healthy lives outside of the school day.

Books in the mail: Teach Like A Champion

Doug Lemov's new book about improving classroom arrived on my desk today and I'm quite interested in reading it. My understanding of the premise is that he has developed a new vocabulary to describe teaching processes that will improve the kind of feedback that teachers receive. I'm not sure if this is what he actually does, but those are my beliefs as to the book's contents, and something I would argue are dreadfully needed in education as it's not enough simply to demand higher scores or lower drop out rates - the idea that there are more effective and less effective techniques seems straightforward, but a good job describing these has yet to be done.

One word of caution now that the book has arrived, I do take a little issue at his subtitle: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college, as if to say the whole purpose of the k-12 system is to move the roughly 1/3 of high school students who attend any form of post-secondary education (at least here in Alberta) to something resembling 1/2 or higher. It also suggests that a k-12 education that terminates in a successful high school graduation is not a success unless the student enrolls in further study.

Are high schools still sites of conflict?

(cross-posted with What Sister Ray Said)

A few friends of mine recently made a passing reference to the period of time starting in the post-grunge years (1994) to some unidentifiable terminal year that has only recently passed, as being a kind of “neo-Sixties.” Their evidence, and none of them made any kind of claim to academic accuracy, was the resurgence of pot use, focused demonstrations against global capitalism (notably the Battle In Seattle and anti-G8 protests), and other protests against the “unjust wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. While this might be superficially true, I’ve always thought that the general rebelliousness and questioning of institutions during the 1960s was much more far-reaching than we tend to remember it today. One of my favourite classes of stories was the surprisingly common one I call “The Day the Hippies Came and Took over My High School.” The number of incidences of “hippies,” whether they be actual bearded longhairs, or members of the SDS, SNCC, Weathermen, sympathetic Black Panther group, or other civil rights/anti-war group, storming the local high school to institute “teach-ins” is pretty high across the eastern US. The same cannot be said for the period 1994-present. Part of this might be the difference that the Internet has played in distributing information, but I wonder how much might also be the case that the K-12 system, and high school in particular, is no longer seen as the part of the general “system of coercion” that it appeared to radicals in the 1960s. Or maybe that idea is now just taken for granted, but attacking it is assumed to be futile. I’m not sure, but this extended 1971 quote from Michel Foucault seems to outline the thinking at the time pretty good:

“…in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society in such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attach them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of supports; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible, the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.”

- from The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature

Thoughts on iBrain and engaging students

Last summer I was part of a reading group that looked at the book iBrain by Gary Small. I was also part of the selection committee that picked the book. We were looking for something that would prompt teachers to think about changes that young people were undergoing both in terms of how they lived their daily lives and the way they thought about particular things. At a Reaching & Teaching presentation earlier that spring, Ian Jukes seemed to endorse the book (he might also have just as likely been name-dropping it, to give the appearance that he had read it).

After distributing the book to our reading group, and explaining our hope to have conversations around it over the summer via Twitter, we left them to their thoughts. Our efforts to have teachers use Twitter ended up not amounting to much. In retrospect, I think that had we prompted via email teachers more over the summer to use Twitter, we might have had better uptake.

When we returned to discuss the book in face to face meetings in the fall teachers quite upset over some of Gary Small's ideas. Part of the problem lay in a misunderstanding that teachers had regarding our purpose. They thought that we had picked the book in order to discuss how best to implement it, not as a discussion prompt. Many teachers reported breezing through the first few chapters, until they got to one of two parts. For some, Small's use of the word "evolutionary" to describe his idea about how children's use of technology causes the rewiring of a child's neural network, caused them to question many of Small's scientific credentials. For them, "evolutionary" refers solely to a process that occurs on a multi-generational scale - "adaptive" might have been a better word choice for what Small had in mind. For other teachers, it was Small's endorsement of a study that seemed to link TV-watching to autism. Once suspicious of Small, they became far more critical about what they were reading.

My thoughts on the experience run as follows:

1. I was surprised that teachers did not begin reading the book critically from page one. It seemed that the very fact that we suggested the book gave it a critical endorsement. Since teachers accepted our informal expertise (insofar as it went towards the book selection) they accepted that the book had a certain intrinsic merit. The conversation we wanted to have was actually about whether the book had that very same merit, whereas the conversation they expected was about how best to implement the merit of the book. I can't help but assume that this same confusion over purpose happens everytime we ask students to read something.

2. Teachers believed the book had merit, then felt betrayed when their own experiences caused them to question certain aspects of it. I think this is a very important part of the reading process, the bringing to bear of personal experience, and part of the question then becomes, how do you prepare students to read books on subjects that they do not necessarily have any experience in.

3. After falling out with Small, teachers were extremely reluctant to endorse any of his ideas, but curiously, did not link Small's idea that use of digital technologies causes a change in the ordering of dendrites, to those of Marcia Tate, of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites fame. If you accept that Tate and Small are both talking about worksheets, ipods, and computers as tools that aid in learning, there is no real difference in their argument. I know a fair number of these teachers are big fans of Tate, so there appears to be a bit of a disconnect there.

Building a Better Teacher

Last week The New York Times ran a piece on education reform. It's a topic that's quite near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued. The article was essentially a pre-release interview with Doug Lemov, the author of a new book entitled Teach Like A Champion. Lemov's basic thrust was that teachers lack the basic vocabulary to describe the act of teaching and this undermines many of their efforts to teach better. My experiences with teachers and teacher improvement certainly validates this idea. True, teachers have no shortage of conceptual frameworks to explain and support the activities that they are having students engage in, they are considerably weaker in using language to describe their day-to-day activities to their peers. This is an important shortcoming to remedy because it prevents teachers from properly identifying what it is that's working in their classrooms as well as offering each other constructive criticism aimed at improving weak practice.

In the last five years or so, I think there has been a tremendous degree of improvement in the language of assessment; teachers have a better capacity to explain what they are assessing, when, how, and why, but assessment and instruction are not the same. I'd like to think that the one follows the other, that from a better understanding of assessment, we will be better able to zero in on what exactly students need to do better in order to understand better.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed to see that much of the article's focus was on techniques for classroom management, rather than instruction. I am intrigued enough to have ordered a copy of Lemov's book, but I find that conversations that focus on classroom management tend to miss the point. When looking at ideas related to classroom reform, I ask myself the following questions:

- who decides what the student will learn on a given day?

- who decides how the student will learn?

- who decides when the student is done learning?

People who answer these questions with "the teacher" are not moving in the same direction as me.

Undecipherable Notes: CES 2010 Higher Education

Higher ed tech pt.2

Will anyone ever go to class again

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?

Followup: m2kidz, anytime, anywhere learning, Arizona state university using google suites throughout campus

Followup: John katzman, 2tor
Eduardo Moura, cengage learning (formerly thomson media)

***key takeaways: more time spent in online environment = more time on task and greater success. UofPhoenix assigns three staff to each cohort in a TA role, because students need feedback and guidance (always, eh?)

***LMS puts emphasis on teacher, social networks on students, and virtual worlds highlight community


How disruptive innovation will change the way college students learn?

Michael Horn, innosight institute, harvars book I read,
Suggests that higher education institutions like harvars centraliZed
Access to knowledge in one place. The rise of state colleges was a decentralizing act, furthered by the development of community colleges.
***the Internet has decentralized things even more, by changing the locus of information access from institutions to my pocket

Peter smith, kaplan higher education
University graduation process is based on training (and weeding) students based on the premise that the jobs they are preparing for are scarce. However, given and environment of
Global mobility, the scarcity of such jobs drops dramatically.

The locus of the higher Ed experience will become the governing architecture of the course, no simply the physical architecture of the campus.

Followup: kaplan higher education looks to translate existing student experiences and learning into portable course accreditation

Christopher dede wants accreditation to be based on compentency not seat time (Carnegie unit)

***key to disruptive succeses is to setup shop on the borders of existing regulations, on areas where the market is non-existent, gather market growth and then chip away at existing regulations as regulators take notice of your activity
***so what are the borders of the k-12 system?

Followup: high tech back pack companies

Key Takeaway From Kids@Play 2010

Undecipherable Notes from CES 2010

Kids@play
Alan Kay
Children want to learn the human universals
To be successful, a product or service must "amplify" one or more of these universals
Look at towards a theory of instruction by Jerome bruner

Low-pass filter idea? Many good
Ideas of The 1960s still lay dormant

Michael resnick
As if students had learned to read but not write

***too much of teacher education emphasises mastering of knowledge and knowledge specialization, while this is fundamentally important, the vital activity in the teaching of students is not specialized knowledge transfer, but an understanding and appreciation of the variety of activities and uses that might allow students to engage and deconstruct it.


Follow-up: scratch.MIT.edu

Family story play by sesame workshop and nokia. Appears as heavy covered book with two screens, one with video-conferencing capabalities. This allows for a partner on the other side with the same book to engage in paired reading facilitated by Elmo.

Disney is working on flash based vision recognition software that can recognize movement and text, using a webcam to interact with online
Environments

****robots are huge here, as is hardware skins and customizations, and 3D hi-def tv with glasses

Disney toybridge allows for universal
Interfaces, suggests the ability of extra-user or actor using the flash based cloud based programmer to control one of their motion sensing robots

Zoodles and leapfrog toys and sites provide parents with usage feedback - how similar is this to the feedback in students provided to teachers in our LMS?

Kevin Clark George mason university
Black college football experience
On doing social outreach: It's a long haul. You can't just build it, copy it and hand it out.

Followup: Common Sense Media

Karen cator: Obama considers education a civil rights issue and the social justice issue of our time.
Want to move to continuous improvement based on immediate data collection ***how will they do this?
Preliminary draft forthcoming online

Cator: calling for more social network use in schools to further digital citizenship developmet

FCC chairman: calls broadband penetration the engine of future economic activity

***seems to be a disparaging trend to feel that computer technology is being used primarily for entertainment and not education - this is really no different than any other piece of information technology. What, after all, is the ratio of published works of fiction to non-fiction?

Higher Education Technology
***if someone steals all my personal information, in terms of behaviours, preferences, and physical attributes but not my name and address, if they use this to create a bot that impersonates these features, have they stolen my identity? Is there not a doppelgänger out there who behaves in the online world the same as I do, but simply does not reference itself as me?

However, statistically speaking, how many other people online naturally have these attributes? What then is te difference between them, me, and my doppelgänger?

***full room, slightly older crowd, higher ed must be big money

Undersecretary of education dr. Margaret cantor
Obama Administration has the ambitious aim of producing the most college graduates worldwide by 2020
Looking to expand (introduce?) early childhood learning to prepare students for kindergarten. ***what does this look like? Is this pre-school?

**video-congerencig capabilites needs to be ubiquitious. Time for Alberta Supernet 2.0, to provide the massive amounts of bandwidth required.

***If we have the bandwidth, we could partner up with senior centres for reading partnerships, or high schools, or hospitals, or even parents at work

**is it a question of bandwidth per se, or is it a question of piping and distribution? If we treat the school like an apartment building, would we do things differently?

Follow-up: race to the top, achieve.org
**want to update graduation requirements by 25%, how will this impact graduation rates?

***part of the issue is that contemporary schooling seems out of synch with the public's desire for education as an aspirational goal. Before, in the early days of the last century, the education system was not expected to graduate everyone, and I do not beleive that every parent sent their child to school with goal of graduation in my mind, consider that none of my, or my wife, have grandparents with high school diplomas. There's a lot of talk of 1/3 of children not being ready for kindergarten, primarily in terms of language acquistion and socialization. Cantor is suggesting that these children are at risk for falling behind and finally falling out if the school system. I'm not sure this is significantly different than 100 years ago, only that no expected the Italian or Ruthenian students who spoke solely Italian and Ukranian at home to graduate, so these students lagging behind educationally and dropping out, or being shifted out of an academic track and into a technical one, was not seen as a bad, or less worthwhile, thing.

Obama adminstration is considering income based student loan repayment schemes as well loan forgiveness for students who enter careers in public service for ten years.
***might this encourage young graduates to teach for ten years before moving on to other careers? Would this higher teacher turnover promote innovation?

***is it time to push for an on-going teacher training professional development system that ties into mandatory periodic re-certification of teachers?

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?

Every Bunsen Needs a Beaker

My family picked this t-shirt out for me while we were on holiday, in reference to some of the work I've done on twitter under the name 'Bunsens', itself a nickname relic from my university days. But while I've been modestly busy on twitter, the thought occurred to me that I hadn't really done a whole lot over here, despite a backlog of material.

I intend to change that in the coming days.